Jews and American Public Life: Essays on American Jewish History and Politics 9781644698822

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JEWS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE Es s ays on Ameri ca n Jewish History and Polit ics

North American Jewish Studies

Series Editor Ira Robinson (Concordia University)

JEWS AND AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE Essays on American Jewish History and Politics David G. Dalin With a Foreword by

Jonathan D. Sarna

BOSTON 2022

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Dalin, David G., author. Title: Jews and American public life : essays on American Jewish history and politics / David Dalin. Description: Boston : Academic Studies Press, 2022. | Series: North American Jewish studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022014151 (print) | LCCN 2022014152 (ebook) | ISBN 9781644698815 (hardback) | ISBN 9781644698822 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781644698839 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Jews--United States--Biography. | Jews--United States--History. Classification: LCC E184.37 .A1325 2022 (print) | LCC E184.37 (ebook) | DDC 973/.04924--dc23/eng/20220506 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014151 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022014152 ISBN 9781644698815 (hardback) ISBN 9781644698822 (adobe PDF) ISBN 9781644698839 (ePub) Copyright © 2022 Academic Studies Press All rights reserved Book design by Tatiana Vernikov Cover design by Ivan Grave Published by Academic Studies Press 1577 Beacon Street Brookline, MA 02446 USA [email protected] www.academicstudiespress.com

This book is lovingly dedicated to: my daughter Simona and her husband Honi; my son Barry and his wife Belen; and my grandson, Simon Zev

Contents Foreword by Jonathan D. Sarna

IX

Acknowledgments

XI

Introduction

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Part One Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and American Jews 1. The Founding Fathers and American Jews 2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews 3. The Appointment of Louis D. Brandeis, First Jewish Justice on the Supreme Court

2 22 46

Part Two German-Jewish Notables and American Jewish Public Life 4. Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life 5. Patron Par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary 6. Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party 7. The Legacy of Julius Rosenwald 8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions 9. Cyrus Adler and the Rescue of Jewish Refugee Scholars

66 79 97 128 134 166

Part Three Church-State Relations and American Jews 10. How High the Wall? American Jews and the Church-State Debate

180

Part Four Jews and Civil Liberties 11. Jews, Nazis, and Civil Liberties

204

Part Five Jews and City Politics 12. Jewish Republicanism and City Politics: The San Francisco Experience, 1911–1963

232

Part Six Jewish Intellectuals and Jewish Public Life 13. From Marxism to Judaism: Will Herberg in Retrospect 14. The Jewish Historiography of Hannah Arendt

252 262

Part Seven Jews, Baseball, and American Public Life 15. Hank Greenberg at 100: Remembering Baseball’s Greatest Jewish Superstar 16. A Brief, Brilliant Career: Why We Can’t Forget Sandy Koufax

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Index

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Foreword

Jonathan D. Sarna University Professor, Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History, Brandeis University

The eminent American Reform rabbi and scholar Emil G. Hirsch of Chicago, writing an authoritative 1907 encyclopedia article on “Judaism and the Jews in the United States,” dismissed the subject of American Jewish politics in a mere nineteen words. “Politically,” he wrote “the Jews are divided. There is no solid Jewish vote. Most of the Jews have no political aspirations.”1 Hirsch’s characterization reflects a widespread taboo concerning the subject of American Jewish politics that continues to the present day. In scholarly circles, the changing political behavior of American Jews has for the most part been ignored. Howard M. Sachar’s A History of the Jews in America, weighing in at more than 1000 pages, contains no index entry under politics at all! For all that American Jewish scholars passionately debate US politics, only rarely do they dispassionately study it. David G. Dalin stands out as a notable exception to this rule. In a career spanning more than forty years, he has devoted much of his scholarship to American Jewish political history and the role that Jews played in American public life. His authored and coauthored books include such titles as The Presidents of the United States and the Jews; Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court; and Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience. His articles range from the era of the American Revolution (“The Founding Fathers and America’s Jews”) to the political behavior of such turn-of-the-twentieth-century American Jewish notables as Mayer Sulzberger, Louis Marshall, Julius Rosenwald, and Cyrus Adler, to the post-World War II era and neo-conservatism. Uniquely, Dalin has taught us about Jewish Republicans. His luminous study of Jewish Republicanism and urban politics in San Francisco, 1911–1963, and his path-breaking article on “Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote and the Republican Party” remind us that Jewish political behavior is far more complicated 1

Emil G. Hirsch, “Judaism and the Jews in the United States,” New American Supplement to the New Werner Twentieth-Century Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (Akron, OH: Werner, 1907), vol. 27, 467 [composed 1897].

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Foreword. Jonathan D. Sarna

and variegated than generally imagined. Similarly, his study of “Jewish Critics of Strict Separationism” and his article on Will Herberg recall minority voices in American Jewish life that too many others have contemptuously ignored. One of Dalin’s most famous articles, originally appearing in the American Jewish Year Book, concerns a path breaking debate in 1977 over whether members of the American Nazi Party could be barred from marching in Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago suburb where a significant community of Jewish survivors of the Holocaust resided. The politics surrounding the “Skokie Affair,” which saw the liberal American Civil Liberties Union defend America Nazis’ right to speak and march, anticipated battles over hate speech and the limits of liberalism that would come to divide Jews nationwide. “The political climate of the country is clearly changing,” Dalin presciently warned his readers. “There appears to be a growing indifference to Jewish concerns. Jews see themselves faced with new threats to their security.” As David Dalin shows in this volume, which brings together sixteen of his most significant articles, the history of Jews and American politics is an illuminating field, replete with insights both for scholars and for practitioners. Rather than ignoring the political dimension of American Jewish life and pretending that “Jews have no political aspirations,” as so many have for so long, one hopes that a future generation will walk in Professor Dalin’s footsteps and bring the study of “Jews and American Public Life” into the scholarly forefront.

Acknowledgments

The publication of this collection of essays affords me a welcome opportunity to publicly acknowledge my thanks to a number of people. I owe a debt of gratitude to Ira Robinson for first inviting me to edit this collection of my essays for the Academic Studies Press’s series on North American Jewish Studies of which he is the series editor. I am also grateful to the Academic Studies Press’s senior editor Alessandra Anzani, for her many helpful suggestions and encouragement throughout the editing of this manuscript. So too, I wish to thank Ekaterina Yanduganova, the Academic Studies Press’s copyeditor, for her excellent copyediting of my manuscript. I owe a special debt of gratitude to my good friend Jonathan D. Sarna, who has read almost everything I have published over the past forty years, for writing the foreword to this volume. His encyclopedic knowledge of American Jewish history, and his willingness to share his knowledge and insights with colleagues and friends, has been an inspiration to me in completing this book, as it has in all my other published work in the field of American Jewish history and politics. I remain ever grateful to Jonathan for his continuing advice, encouragement, and friendship. I also owe a debt of thanks to John F. Rothmann, my cherished friend of more than fifty years, who also read and commented on many chapters of this book manuscript. His invaluable suggestions, deriving from his vast knowledge of American, and American Jewish, political history and biography, have helped make this a better book. The publication of this book gives me the welcome opportunity to express my enduring gratitude to John Rothmann for his continuing encouragement, wise counsel and friendship. I am also very grateful to my wonderful wife Miriam Sanua Dalin, who has spent many hours reviewing, proofreading, and further editing the manuscript and, in so doing, has made it a more readable volume. Her loving support throughout the process of preparing this collection of essays for publication has been a source of inspiration. A further debt of gratitude goes to my daughter Simona and her husband Honi, and my son Barry and his wife Belen, for their continuing love and support. It is to them and to my grandson Simon Zev, who was born as this book was nearing completion, that this book is lovingly dedicated.

Introduction This volume contains a selection of sixteen of my essays, on the theme of Jews and American public life, published during the past forty years. In the essays in this volume, I sought to analyze and document how American Jews have participated in, and thought about, politics and public life. While a great deal has been written about the history of the American Jewish experience generally, little has been written on the subject of Jews and American politics and public life. This is especially true about the subject of Jews and the American presidency, a subject that I have been writing about for more than twenty years. In our book The Presidents of the United States and the Jews, Alfred J. Kolatch and I examined the role and experience of Jews in each presidential administration from George Washington to Bill Clinton, and discussed the relationship of each of the presidents to the American Jewish community at large and to individual American Jews. The history of Jewish-presidential relations and of Jewish involvement in American public life generally begins in the early republic, with the presidency of George Washington, who was the first president to visit and speak at a synagogue in the United States and to correspond with American Jews. The famed correspondence between Jews and Washington was the first instance of proactive Jewish involvement in American public life. In the historic letter of the “Hebrew Congregation in Newport” to the president, composed for his visit to that city on August 17, 1790, following Rhode Island’s ratification of the Constitution, the Jews of Newport noted past discrimination against Jews, praised the new American government for “generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” and thanked God “for all the blessings of civil and religious liberty” that Jews now enjoyed under the Constitution. President Washington, in his oft-quoted reply, reassured the Jewish community about what he correctly viewed as its central concern—religious liberty. Appropriately, a phrase contained in the Newport Congregation’s original letter, he famously characterized the United States government as one that “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” Comparatively little has been written about the relationship between George Washington and the other founding fathers and America’s Jews. In my article on this topic in this volume, I discuss the interaction and correspondence of four founders—George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton—with individual Jews, and their views on Jews and Judaism.

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In addition to being among the most prominent founders, these men represent different approaches to, and engagement with, Judaism. Beginning in the early republic, and throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Jews looked to the presidency for significant presidential statements and policy positions relating to antisemitism abroad and to the plight of Jews denied religious and political freedom in Eastern Europe. Presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Benjamin Harrison, for example, both expressed public concern and sympathy for the worsening predicament of the Jews in tsarist Russia and Romania and were willing to protest to the tsarist government in Saint Petersburg on their behalf. In 1869, when Jewish leaders brought to Grant’s attention the fact that the expulsion of twenty thousand Jews from an area in southwestern Russia was being contemplated, he intervened with the tsarist government and the expulsion order was rescinded. As the pogroms and antisemitic expulsion of Jews in tsarist Russia escalated in 1890 and 1891, a delegation of Jewish leaders including Simon Wolf, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus, and Louis Marshall, met with President Harrison in the White House in April 1891 “to discuss the state of Tsarist anti-Semitism and what the United States government might do to alleviate the plight of Russian Jews.” President Harrison subsequently requested that Congress adopt a strong resolution calling upon the US State Department to officially protest Russia’s anti-Jewish persecutions. In his Annual Message to Congress on December 9, 1891, moreover, Harrison expressed “his sympathy for the Jews of Russia in the most unequivocal of terms.” This was the first of many occasions in which Schiff, Wolf, Straus, and Marshall worked together to lobby Presidents on behalf of Jewish rights at home and abroad. Between the 1890s and 1930s, this small group of Jewish communal leaders, all men of wealth and political influence in the Republican Party, working together with Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Cyrus Adler, Felix Warburg, Julius Rosenwald, and others, played an influential role in American Jewish public life and in American politics. In 1901, Schiff, Wolf, and Straus successfully lobbied President Theodore Roosevelt and his secretary of state John Hay to respond forcefully to the Romanian Government because of its new antisemitic Trades Law, the result of which was to ban the employment of Jewish workers from any trade. Antisemitic riots in tsarist Russia caused these American Jewish notables to consider the need for a more permanent organization. In April 1903, the infamous pogrom in the town of Kishinev in southwestern Russia—in which forty-five Jews were killed, hundreds injured, and thousands of Jewish homes and businesses destroyed—was followed by dozens more pogroms between 1903 and 1906. As a result, in early 1906, Jacob Schiff wrote a letter to

Introduction

more than fifty prominent Jewish leaders throughout the country inviting them to New York to discuss forming a committee to protect the political rights and lives of Jews in the United States and throughout the world. Thus, the American Jewish Committee (AJC), one of the most influential Jewish organizations in the country and an important foreign policy voice for American Jews, was born. Judge Mayer Sulzberger served as the first president of the AJC from 1906 to 1912. For close to sixty years, Sulzberger, a pillar of the Republican Party in Philadelphia, and a close friend of President William Howard Taft, played an extraordinary role in American Jewish public life, exercising a profound and far-reaching influence on the leadership and political direction of Jewish organizational life in America. As president of the American Jewish Committee, Sulzberger’s greatest achievement was bringing about the abrogation of the RussoAmerican Commercial Treaty of 1832 because of Russia’s refusal to recognize United States passports when American Jews wished to travel freely to tsarist Russia. In the first of my two articles about Mayer Sulzberger in this volume, I discuss and analyze the history of the political campaign to abrogate the treaty and ensure the religious liberty of American Jews traveling abroad, led by Sulzberger, Louis Marshall, and Jacob Schiff between 1908 and 1912. Sulzberger was also one of the great philanthropists in American Jewish history. Part of Sulzberger’s unique and enduring legacy as a Jewish public servant and philanthropist, as I discuss in some detail in my second article about him, derived from his extraordinary achievement as a rare book collector and as a patron of Jewish libraries and scholarship. During his lifetime, Sulzberger was the foremost private collector of Jewish books and manuscripts in America. More than any other individual, Mayer Sulzberger can be considered the “founder” of the Jewish Theological Seminary’s incomparable Judaica library, one of the single largest aggregations of Jewish books and manuscripts in the world, that came to rival the great Jewish libraries of England and Europe. Almost from its inception, he was the library’s most generous benefactor, its patron par excellence. In a related article, I discuss and analyze the life, business career and philanthropic achievements of Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company and, like Sulzberger, one of the preeminent Jewish philanthropists in the early twentieth century. While Rosenwald’s accomplishments at Sears showed him to be a true pioneer of modern business—Henry Ford is said to have borrowed the assembly line technique from Rosenwald—he was also a trailblazer in the field of philanthropy, devoting as much energy to giving away his wealth as to acquiring it.

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In 1929, Mayer Sulzberger’s cousin Cyrus Adler (1863–1940), to whom I dedicate two articles in this book, became president of the AJC. Although a committed non-Zionist, as I discuss in the first of my two articles, during the 1920s Adler worked closely with Chaim Weizmann and Louis Marshall in the creation and development of the expanded Jewish Agency for Palestine. As I analyze in some detail, Adler was in the forefront of forging the rapprochement between the Zionist and non-Zionist leadership of the Jewish Agency and must be credited with being one of its most influential architects and farsighted leaders. During the last years of his life, in the late 1930s, as I discuss and analyze in the second of my two articles, Adler was instrumental in helping to rescue, resettle, and secure academic positions for Jewish refugee scholars from Nazi Germany. Between the presidential elections of 1868 and 1932, a majority of American Jewish leaders identified with and actively supported the Republican Party, its candidates, and its policies. Between 1896 and 1928, the most influential Jewish Republican Party leader was the eminent attorney Louis Marshall, who served as president of the AJC from 1912 until his death in 1929. In this volume, I devote one article, “Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote and the Republican Party,” to Marshall’s important role in Republican Party politics and American Jewish public life, and to his views on the Jewish vote. Although a pillar of the Republican Party, Marshall was also the best-known and most articulate proponent of the doctrine of Jewish political neutrality, denying the very existence of a Jewish vote and continuously calling upon his fellow Jews not to vote as Jews in the political arena, but as American citizens. At the same time, however, Marshall was always ready to use his high standing in the Republican Party to seek electoral support for Republican candidates in the name of American Jews, and to leverage the Jewish vote to urge or pressure Republican Presidents and Secretaries of State on issues of Jewish concern. While in theory Marshall deplored the concept of a Jewish vote, in practice he knew there were Jewish voters, especially among the newly enfranchised East European Jewish immigrants, who might be instructed and advised on political candidates and issues, and he not infrequently sought to instruct and advise them. As I discuss in this article, this was his objective when he began to publish a Yiddish newspaper, the Jewish World, in 1902, to support Republican candidates at election time and to urge Jewish voters on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to rally to their support. During Marshall’s lifetime and in the decades that followed, the “Jewish vote” was a coveted prize in presidential elections. Since the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt, the vast majority of Jewish voters have supported the Democratic Party. In 1932, eighty-two percent of the Jewish vote went to

Introduction

Roosevelt, while only eighteen percent went to Republican Herbert Hoover. In 1936, FDR received eighty-five percent of the Jewish vote. In the elections of 1940 and 1944, fully ninety percent of American Jews voted for Roosevelt, the largest Jewish vote for a president in American history. Every other Democratic presidential candidate from Harry Truman in 1948 to Hilary Clinton in 2016, with the exception of Jimmy Carter in 1980, received at least sixty percent, and not infrequently more than seventy percent, of the Jewish vote.

Jewish Presidential Appointments Beginning in the early republic, American Jews also looked to the presidency for political recognition in the form of presidential appointments to diplomatic posts and, much later, to the president’s cabinet, the Supreme Court, and the White House staff. Presidential appointments have been an important vehicle for Jews playing an increasingly prominent role in American government and public life. The tradition of Jews receiving presidential appointments is also almost as old as the nation itself. Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, for example, appointed Jews to several consular posts, including Scotland, St. Thomas, and Tunis. In 1853, President Franklin Pierce named August Belmont, the politically influential Jewish financier and Democratic Party fundraiser, to the post of US minister to the Hague. As the first Jew to hold this high rank in the American diplomatic service, Belmont represented the United States in the Netherlands from 1853 to 1857. Throughout his long career in Democratic Party politics, Belmont would raise more money for presidential candidates than any other nineteenth-century Jew. From 1860 to 1872, he would also serve as chairman of the Democratic National Committee, the first Jew to do so. A few months later, in the fall of 1852, President Millard Fillmore had offered Judah P. Benjamin a seat on the Supreme Court. In February of 1852, Benjamin, a Louisiana attorney and politician, had entered national politics, winning a seat in the United States Senate, the first professing Jew to do so. Benjamin declined Fillmore’s Supreme Court appointment, preferring to remain in the Senate, where he soon established a reputation as one of the chamber’s greatest orators, often compared to Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Henry Clay. Similarly, in 1857, Benjamin turned down an offer from President James Buchanan to appoint him US minister to Spain. When Louisiana seceded from the Union in February 1861, however, Benjamin, a passionate Southerner, resigned his Senate seat. Soon thereafter, Confederate President Jefferson Davis

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appointed Benjamin attorney general of the Confederacy, making him the first Jew to hold a cabinet-level office in an American government. Benjamin subsequently served as the Confederacy’s secretary of war and secretary of state. In 1881, President James A. Garfield appointed the eminent Jewish communal leader Simon Wolf as US consul general to Egypt. Wolf, a Washington, DC attorney and power broker who was widely acknowledged to be the spokesman for American Jewry in the nation’s capital, was a political confidant of and adviser to every Republican president from Abraham Lincoln to William Howard Taft. Wolf had actively campaigned for Garfield, as he had earlier for Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford B. Hayes, and was rewarded for his many years of service to the Republican Party when he was named consul general to Egypt by President Garfield on July 1, 1881, just one day before the chief executive was to fall mortally wounded to an assassin’s bullet. Wolf would later serve as a close adviser to Presidents Harrison, McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt as well. Between the Civil War and the turn of the century, all Jews who received presidential appointments were nominated for diplomatic posts. Often their religion was important in the decision to appoint them to particular posts. In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, a prominent attorney and Jewish communal leader, US consul to Bucharest, Romania. In sending Peixotto to Bucharest, which was then a hotbed of virulent antisemitism, Grant endorsed the new consul’s intention to use the American consulate to promote Jewish rights and political emancipation in Romania. In 1887, President Grover Cleveland appointed Oscar S. Straus as US minister to Turkey, the second Jew to hold this rank in the American diplomatic service. Straus was an immensely successful and popular minister to Turkey. His gift for diplomacy enabled him to win an invitation from the sultan to arbitrate a business dispute between the Turkish government and Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the Jewish financier and philanthropist who had built the first railroad connecting Constantinople and the cities of Europe. In appointing Oscar Straus the first Jewish US minister to Turkey, President Cleveland established a precedent that every president—Republican and Democrat alike—would follow during the next thirty years. Presidents Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson each appointed Jewish ministers (and later, ambassadors) to Constantinople. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Straus as secretary of commerce and labor, the first Jew named to a president’s cabinet. In 1934, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Henry J. Morgenthau, Jr. as secretary of

Introduction

the treasury. Morgenthau, the son of the businessman and financier Henry J. Morgenthau, Sr., whom Woodrow Wilson had appointed US ambassador to Turkey, would serve as secretary of the treasury for eleven years, longer than any other treasury secretary in American history. As I document in my article “Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews,” which is included in this volume, eighteen Jews served as cabinet members during the twentieth century. Throughout the twentieth century, more and more Jews were appointed to cabinet and subcabinet positions, to advisory positions on the White House staff and to a variety of diplomatic positions. Often, but not always, especially in the early years, the Jews who were appointed were friends and financial supporters of their political benefactors. Often the positions to which they were appointed were those, such as the ambassadorship to Turkey, reserved for Jews. In many respects, the 1990s were a historic—indeed, a golden—era for Jews in American politics and government. In that era, more Jews served together in the Senate and the House of Representatives than at any other time in American history. During the first four years of the 1950s, only one Jew, Jacob Javits, was a member of the United States Senate; in the 1990s, eleven Jews served at one time. Also, during the 1990s, forty-six Jews served in the House of Representatives, as compared to only nineteen during the 1950s. For the first time in American history, a president, Bill Clinton, appointed two Jews, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer, to the United States Supreme Court. In the eight years of his presidency, President Bill Clinton appointed almost as many Jews to cabinet posts as did all of his predecessors combined. More Jews served in prominent White House staff positions in the Clinton administration than at any time since the New Deal. Samuel (Sandy) Berger was appointed special assistant to the president for national security affairs, thus becoming the third Jew in American history to serve as the president’s chief national security policy advisor on the White House staff. Three Jewish attorneys—Bernard Nussbaum, Lloyd Cutler, and former Congressman and former Federal Circuit Court Judge Abner Mikva—served on the White House staff as special counsels to the president. During the Clinton presidency, Jews received more ambassadorial appointments—twenty-eight—including the first appointment as ambassador to Israel, than in any other administration in American history. In 1997, President Clinton also appointed the first religiously Orthodox Jew as ambassador to an Arab country, Egypt. Soon after Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer arrived in Cairo, moreover, a kosher kitchen was installed for him in the Cairo embassy. From Theodore Roosevelt’s historic appointment of Oscar Straus as

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secretary of commerce and labor in 1906 to the extraordinary and unprecedented number of Jewish appointments made by President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, American Jews received ever greater political recognition through presidential appointments, which have been one of the most important vehicles for Jewish representation and participation in American government and public life. And, in August 2000, Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew who did not campaign on the Sabbath, became the first Jewish candidate for vice president. Each of these developments would have been unimaginable during the 1950s. Collectively, they suggest that during the 1990s, as never before, Jews were politically at home in the United States. Since President Woodrow Wilson’s historic appointment of Louis D. Brandeis to the Supreme Court in 1916, which I discuss in much detail in one of the articles in this volume, Jewish appointees to the Supreme Court have also played an influential role in American government and public life. Presidents Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Barack Obama each appointed one Jewish justice to the Supreme Court, while, as noted above, Bill Clinton holds the distinction of being the only president to have appointed two Jews to the United States Supreme Court. Beginning in the last half of the nineteenth century, Jews began to run for elective office in greater numbers and, in so doing, began to play a growing role in American politics and public life. Between 1865 and 2000, 150 Jews were elected to the House of Representatives, and twenty-eight Jews to the United States Senate. The first Jewish Congresswoman, Florence Prag Kahn, a Republican from San Francisco, was elected in 1924 and served in the House until 1937. The first two Jewish women to serve in the Senate were Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, both Democrats elected from California in the early 1990s. Barbara Boxer served in the Senate for eighteen years, while Diane Feinstein (as of this writing) still serves in the US Senate today. Since the nineteenth century, Jewish voters have been concerned over the fate of their coreligionists abroad. In the 1840s, Jewish voters supported the Democrats in gratitude for President Martin Van Buren’s official protest to the Ottoman government over the antisemitic Damascus blood libel accusation, and in the late 1850s punished James Buchanan’s Democrats for the president’s refusal to criticize the Pope in the antisemitic Mortara affair. Between 1865 and 1908, Jewish support for the Republican Party was encouraged by the friendly attitude displayed toward American Jewry by a succession of Republican Presidents, by their appointment of Jews to public office, and by the vigorous protests made by their administrations against antisemitic outrages and pogroms

Introduction

in tsarist Russia and Romania. In city after city—in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, and San Francisco, among others—Jewish voters were strongly Republican until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Jewish Republicanism in San Francisco was unique, however, persisting long beyond the New Deal, while Jews in most other cities had shifted to the Democratic Party with the election of FDR. Also, the type of non-partisan, split-ticket voting that characterized the political behavior of American Jewry generally during this era, was to a degree evident in the political behavior of San Francisco Jews as well. Thus, some staunch and heretofore traditionally Republican Jews in San Francisco would, on occasion, split tickets to vote for FDR or Adlai Stevenson at the national level, while at the same time remaining loyal to the local administrations of San Francisco’s Republican mayors, whose candidacies they continued to vigorously support. Such occasional non-partisan voting notwithstanding, from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s, those Jews who held political office—both elective and appointive—in San Francisco did so, with few exceptions, as Republicans. In this respect, the Jewish political experience in San Francisco was truly distinctive. For this reason, and because the era of Republican ascendency in the city—every mayor of San Francisco between 1911 and 1963 was a Republican—was also an era of extraordinary Jewish influence in the government and politics of the city, the nature of Jewish involvement in San Francisco politics and public life from 1911 to 1963 is especially deserving of the close attention and careful analysis that I give it in one of my articles in this volume.

Church-State Relations For close to one hundred years, the issue of church-state separation and the role that religion should play in American public life have been policy issues of much discussion and debate among American Jews. Since the 1940s at least, most American Jews have conceived of religion and public life as being rigidly separate realms. They have steadfastly opposed the presence of any religious symbols and practices in the public arena. According to the prevailing liberal Jewish separationist faith of the 1950s and 1960s, Jewish survival and freedom are most secure where the wall separating religion and state is strongest and least secure where government and religion are intertwined. For several decades, Leo Pfeffer, one of America’s foremost scholars of church-state relations, was the preeminent Jewish spokesman for the separationist position. Pfeffer, staff attorney and for many years director of the American

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Jewish Congress’s Commission on Law and Social Action, argued more churchstate cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other person in American history, and did more than anyone else to shape and further the legal doctrine of church-state separationism. But the liberal separationist position did not go wholly unchallenged even in its heyday. In articles published during the 1950s and 1960s, Will Herberg, whose life and writings I discuss in this volume, and other Jewish thinkers began to call for a reassessment of the prevailing liberal Jewish consensus that religion should play no role in American public life. During the 1960s, as I discuss in my article “Jewish Critics of Strict Separationism,” other prominent Jewish thinkers such as Milton Himmelfarb, Jakob J. Petuchowski, Seymour Siegel, and Abraham Joshua Heschel, began to eschew their earlier liberal faith in separationism, and to develop a Jewish conservative argument for the desirability of greater religious involvement in American public life. While supporting state aid to parochial schools and questioning Jewish opposition to public school prayer, they (like Herberg) called for an abandonment of the Jewish separationist agenda in favor of a more pro-religion stance. During the 1970s and 1980s, a Jewish neoconservative consensus began to emerge concerning the proper relationship between religion and politics and the role of religious and moral values in shaping American public life. Himmelfarb, Siegel, Irving Kristol, Murray Friedman, and Ruth Wisse, among others, all persuasively warned that an American moral and political culture uninformed by religious beliefs and institutions undermined the position of Jews and the health of a democratic society. Their concern was shared by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who, although “a man of the left,” emerged late in life as a critic of the liberal strict separationist position. In his later years, he had increasing misgivings about the efforts of liberal Jewish leaders, such as Leo Pfeffer, to challenge the constitutionality of tax exemptions for churches and synagogues. The growth of Jewish day school education, to which Heschel was deeply committed, prompted him to rethink his own earlier opposition to state support for parochial schools. His views on such church-state policy questions—as on other political and social issues that he addressed as a public theologian—were predicated on the assumption that his religious values and beliefs shaped his political commitments. Dissenting from the liberal Jewish consensus, Heschel did not subscribe to the view that religious values and theological insight should be expunged from American public life. His general view of the relation of religion to politics and public life was, in fact, a considerable departure from the prevailing Jewish consensus—and remains

Introduction

today much closer to the Jewish critique of strict separationism that most liberal Jews oppose. Until the beginning of the 1970s, it could be argued that the concern of some Jewish community leaders for the position of Jews in the United States was exaggerated. Antisemitism had largely disappeared in the years following World War II. Reaction to the atrocities of the Nazi era was such that even mildly antisemitic public utterances came to be viewed as unacceptable. The civic status of American Jews seemed more secure than ever before. By 1980, the year that my article on “Jews, Nazis, and Civil Liberties” was published, the “Golden Age” of American Jewish life had come to an end. American Jews were experiencing a growing anxiety over various developments of the previous decade, including the growth of Black Power, the emergence of quotas in employment and education, and the growth of Arab influence in the United States. The political climate of the country was clearly changing; there appeared to be a growing indifference to Jewish political concerns. American Jews viewed themselves as facing new threats to their security. Adding to the new sense of insecurity was the much-publicized activities of neo-Nazi groups in Skokie, Illinois and in San Francisco, activities that the Jewish community was unable to halt. While few in number, the Nazis, evoking nightmarish memories of the Holocaust, sent a shudder through American Jewry. In this article, I examine the impact on the American Jewish community of the revival of neo-Nazi activities in the United States. Specifically, I focus on the much-publicized proposed neo-Nazi march through the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois in 1977, and the opening of a Nazi bookstore—the Rudolf Hess bookstore housed ironically in a building owned by a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz—across the street from a synagogue in San Francisco the same year, and the Jewish community’s response to both these events. In both cities, the immediate targets of Nazi provocation were groups of Jewish survivors who had settled in the United States in the aftermath of the Holocaust. In this article, I discuss and analyze the controversial decision of the American Civil Liberties Union to go to court to defend the First Amendment rights of the neo-Nazis to march in Skokie and to open a Nazi bookstore in San Francisco, and the anger of many Jews over the ACLU’s decision to do so. In two of my articles, I discuss the lives and writings of Will Herberg, one of the most thoughtful and provocative American Jewish religious thinkers of the post-World War II generation, and Hannah Arendt, one of America’s most influential political theorists and intellectuals of the 1940s–1970s. A Marxist

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and atheist through much of his young adulthood, Herberg turned to the study of Judaism only after his romance with Marxism ended. A prolific and influential Jewish theologian and sociologist of religion, beginning in the 1940s his spiritual journey from Marxism to Judaism was unique in the American Jewish intellectual history of the twentieth century. In 1951, Arendt published her magisterial study of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which established her reputation as a major political theorist, with a gift for sweeping historical generalizations. Few theories of Jewish history have been so controversial as Arendt’s thesis of the fundamentally apolitical nature of the modern Jewish experience in the widely acclaimed The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she offered a penetrating analysis of antisemitism and an interpretation of modern Jewish history that has continued to be a source of public discussion and debate among Jewish historians and social scientists alike. One area of American public life in which Jews have made a notable contribution is sports generally, and baseball in particular. The concluding two articles in this volume are devoted to the historic role and contribution of Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax, baseball’s two greatest Jewish superstars, and the only Jewish players ever elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame. During his nine-season career, Greenberg led the American League in home runs four times, in RBIs, four times, and was twice voted the American League’s Most Valuable Player. Greenberg’s significance as a Jewish baseball icon, and his enduring niche in American Jewish history, was achieved in September 1934, when he refused to play on Yom Kippur despite his Detroit Tigers team’s pursuit of the American League pennant. Against the backdrop of the rising antisemitism in the Depression decade, which was especially strong in Detroit, Greenberg’s decision to publicly affirm Jewish religious tradition by not playing on Yom Kippur was a defining moment and a source of pride and inspiration for Jewish baseball fans throughout America, who came to refer to him as a “Jewish standard bearer” for his people, as a Jewish role model of historic proportions. Koufax, the subject of my second article, was the outstanding Jewish baseball player of the post-World War II era, and one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history. When Koufax refused to pitch the first game of the 1965 World Series, because it fell on Yom Kippur, his decision, like Greenberg’s thirty years earlier, was a public affirmation of his Jewish identity that became a source of pride to fellow American Jews. By refusing to pitch on Yom Kippur, Koufax defined himself publicly as a man of religious principle who placed religious faith above craft, and, like Greenberg, became inextricably linked with the American Jewish experience.

1

The Founding Fathers and American Jews* Much has been written about the Jewish contribution to the American Revolution and the impact of the Revolution on American Jews.1 The Revolution, Jonathan D. Sarna noted, ushered in a new era for American Jews in which “changes in law and in the relationship of religion to the state . . . transformed American Jewish life forever after.”2 New constitutions, promulgated by almost every state after 1776, promised Jewish citizens a greater measure of religious freedom than they had heretofore enjoyed. Virginia’s historic Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom, drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and enacted in 1786, proclaimed that “all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”3 The Northwest Ordinance, adopted by *

1

2 3

“The Founding Fathers and America’s Jews” was published originally as “Jews, Judaism and the American Founding,” in Faith and the Founders of the American Republic, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press, all rights reserved. Jewish contributions to the American Revolution are discussed in Samuel Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots: The Jews in the American Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1975); Richard Morris, “The Jewish Role in the American Revolution in Historical Perspective,” in Jewish Life in America, ed. Gladys Rosen (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1978), 8–17; Leon Huhner, “Francis Salvador: A Prominent Patriot of the Revolutionary War,” in The Jewish Experience in America, ed. Abraham J. Karp (Waltham, MA: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), 1:276–291; Alf J. Mapp, Jr., “Haym Solomon,” in The Faiths of Our Fathers: What America’s Founders Really Believed (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 146–152; and Fritz Hirschfeld, George Washington and the Jews (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2005). The best analysis of the impact of the Revolution on American Jews is Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Impact of the American Revolution on American Jews,” in The American Jewish Experience, ed. Jonathan D. Sarna (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1986), 18–28. Jonathan D. Sarna, American Judaism: A History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 36. Daniel L. Dreisbach and Mark David Hall, The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund Press, 2009), 251.

1. The Founding Fathers and American Jew

the Confederation Congress in 1787 and affirmed by the new national government in 1789, extended religious freedom into the territories north of the Ohio River. With the ratification of a new national Constitution forbidding religious tests for federal offices, and the First Amendment prohibiting Congress from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” the hopes of revolutionary-era American Jews for equal rights were finally being realized.4 By the time of American Independence, approximately two thousand Jews lived in the former British colonies. They were concentrated in five cities: New York, Philadelphia, Newport, Charleston, and Savannah. Many Jews supported the War for Independence, and some were active in early national politics, but there were no Jewish delegates to the Continental Congresses, no Jewish signatories to the Declaration of Independence, and no Jewish members of the Federal Convention of 1787. As Sarna pointed out, “the Constitutional Convention, and most state discussions concerning the place of religion in American life, ignored Jews. The major American documents bearing on religious liberty do not mention them even once.”5 Moreover, the promise of religious equality made by the founding fathers in the First Amendment to the US Constitution, and in other documents of the American founding, was not immediately translated into practice. At the time the national Constitution was ratified, “[a]ll but two states had religious tests banning Jews . . . from public office.”6 Jews, along with other taxpayers, were required to support Christian churches and ministers in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, New Jersey, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina.7 South Carolina’s constitution of 1778 declared “the Christian Protestant religion . . . the established religion of this State.”8 As late as 1816, “more than half of the original thirteen states still denied Jews political equality.”9

4 5 6 7 8 9

Jonathan D. Sarna and David G. Dalin, Religion and State in the American Jewish Experience (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 3, 62. Sarna, American Judaism, 37. Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: How Our Founding Fathers Forged a Radical New Approach to Religious Liberty (New York: Random House, 2008), 132. Ibid., 132–133. Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights, 244. Jacob Rader Marcus, “The Handsome Young Priest in the Black Gown: The Personal World of Gershom Seixas,” Hebrew Union College Annual 40–41 (1969–1970): 424.

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Hebrew, Hebrew Biblical Imagery, and the Founding Fathers “Like their Puritan forebears,” the founding fathers who led America’s War of Independence “frequently compared their own struggle with Great Britain to that of Israel’s contest against Egypt.”10 The founding generation encountered this theme in the sermons of Patriot clergymen, which “reveal that Old Testament analogues were frequently drawn by preachers in their efforts to justify or explain the common desire to break away from British rule.”11 For the American colonists fighting for their independence, “King George was viewed as Pharaoh” of the Old Testament and George Washington was compared to Moses, “who was called up by God to bring freedom to his nation.”12 Indeed, when John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson were asked by the Continental Congress to propose a new national seal, Franklin recommended a design depicting “Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh . . .” and Jefferson suggested a portrayal of the Children of Israel led through the wilderness by a pillar of a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night. Both men agreed that the new national motto should be “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.”13 Many founders, like their Puritan ancestors, venerated the Hebrew language, the Old Testament, and the Jews of the Bible. As Shalom Goldman noted, “the founders of Harvard, Yale and Columbia, and the other early colleges were men for whom the Hebrew language was a source of inspiration and an essential component of a good education.”14 This was especially the case at Harvard, “where the first two college presidents were scholars of Hebrew,” and where all freshmen were required to study the language until 1787. John Adams, for example, who pursued his undergraduate studies at Harvard between 1751 and 1755, studied under Judah Monis, a Jewish convert to Christianity, who taught Hebrew language and grammar at Harvard from 1722 to 1761. Monis also authored A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue, the first Hebrew textbook published 10 Egal Feldman, Dual Destinies: The Jewish Encounter with Protestant America (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 37. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 38. 13 Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights, 229. 14 Shalom Goldman, “Introduction,” in Hebrew and the Bible in America, ed. Shalom Goldman (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and the University Press of New England, 1993), xxi.

1. The Founding Fathers and American Jew

in the American colonies.15 His conversion to Christianity in 1722, about which much has been written, was a prerequisite to his appointment as a Hebrew instructor at Harvard.16 While many founders studied Hebrew and admired the Jewish religion of the ancient Hebrews, the ambivalence of some civic leaders towards Jews and Judaism was evident in their political culture and law. A few founders crafted test oaths restricting the participation of Jews in politics and public life, while others appointed (or recommended the appointment of) Jews to civic and political office, forged cordial relationships with Jewish synagogues, and became friends with individual Jewish supporters of the Patriot cause. Some who studied and revered the Hebrew language of the Old Testament, and admired the Jews of the Hebrew Bible, never socialized with their Jewish compatriots or counted Jews among their neighbors and friends. This chapter discusses the interaction and correspondence of four founders—George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—with individual Jews, and their views of Jews and Judaism. In addition to being among the most prominent founders, these men represent different approaches to, and engagement with, Judaism. Hamilton, who interacted more extensively with Jews than any major founder, had great admiration for the Jewish people. Similarly, Washington viewed American Jews positively and was an important advocate for religious equality. Adams was among the few founders who was clearly a Christian Zionist. Jefferson, by contrast, shared with other Enlightenment rationalists of his generation a decidedly negative view of the Jewish religion. Examining how these four men interacted with Jews and viewed Judaism shines a light on how America’s founders were informed by this religious tradition, and on how they thought Jews should be treated in the new republic.

15 Francis Russell, Adams: An American Dynasty (New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1976), 18–19. Shalom Goldman, ed., Hebrew and the Bible in America (Hanover, NH: Brandeis University Press and the University Press of New England, 1993), 201–202. Monis’s textbook was also used in a number of New England colleges during the eighteenth century; ibid., 202. 16 See, for example, Goldman, Hebrew and the Bible in America, xxi and 108–109; Feldman, Dual Destinies, 16–17; Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 29–31; and Jonathan D. Sarna and Ellen Smith, eds., The Jews of Boston (Boston, MA: Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, Inc., 1995), 30–34.

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George Washington President George Washington was the first leader of a modern nation to acknowledge openly the Jewish people as full-fledged citizens of the country in which they had chosen to settle. Although the Jewish community was small at the time of his inauguration, Washington was well aware of, and grateful for, the substantive contributions Jews had made to the cause of independence and to the founding of the new nation. Washington’s first personal contact with a member of the Jewish community came about as a result of a tragedy—the incurable illness of George and Martha’s daughter Patsy, who suffered from epilepsy. “In an exasperating quest for a cure,” biographer Ron Chernow recounted, the Washingtons “took Patsy to the leading physicians in Williamsburg, including eight visits to Dr. John de Sequeyra, the scion of a prominent family of Sephardic Jews in London.”17 Their encounter with Dr. Sequeyra was “the only time we know for sure that George Washington had contact with a Jew before the Revolution.”18 During the War of Independence, Washington was impressed by the loyalty, courage, and devotion to the Patriotic cause of many Jews. For example, Benjamin Nones, a French Jew who had immigrated to America from Bordeaux in 1772, served as a major on General Washington’s staff and distinguished himself for bravery during the siege of Savannah. Similarly, two Jewish members of Washington’s regiment, Isaac Franks and Philip Moses Russell, shared the hardships of the bitter winter at Valley Forge. Franks, who would achieve the rank of colonel before his retirement from the military, “made a worthy name for himself as a brave and dedicated soldier in the Continental army and consequently enjoyed the personal friendship of George Washington.”19 Russell, a surgeon’s mate on Washington’s medical staff, served the suffering soldiers at Valley Forge with distinction. According to one account, “[h]is personal relationship with General Washington is attested to in [a] special commendation that he ostensibly received (but that cannot be documented in any of Washington’s papers) from the commander in chief: ‘for his assiduous and faithful attention to the sick and wounded, as well as his cool and collected deportment in battle.’”20 Fritz Hirschfeld reported that, in the aftermath of the War of Independence, General 17 18 19 20

Ron Chernow, Washington: A Life (New York: Penguin Press, 2010), 153. Ibid. Hirschfeld, George Washington and the Jews, 71. Ibid, 75.

1. The Founding Fathers and American Jew

Washington did not forget the Jewish soldiers serving in the Continental army “who had faithfully marched with him from the beginning to the end.”21 His friendship with Colonel Isaac Franks, who became a wealthy Philadelphia merchant, would continue throughout the years of his presidency. For two months in 1793, when a deadly yellow fever epidemic spread through the nation’s capital in Philadelphia, President Washington rented Franks’s home in the Philadelphia suburb of Germantown.22 Washington was especially indebted to the courage and devotion of the Polish-born Jew Haym Salomon. Salomon, a broker for the new Office of Finance of the United States, assisted Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris in funding the war effort. “As a broker,” Beth S. Wenger recounted, “Salomon offered a valuable service to the Revolution by raising funds and negotiating bills of exchange with several foreign governments, particularly the French, with whom he had conducted considerable business and established reliable contacts.”23 Throughout the war, Washington repeatedly turned to Salomon because Congress and the state assemblies were not forthcoming in allocating sufficient monies for supplies, ammunition, and salaries. Salomon demonstrated great resourcefulness in securing the funds needed to maintain Washington’s army.24 Although no Jews actively participated in the proceedings of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Jonas Phillips, a German-Jewish immigrant living in Philadelphia, petitioned the Convention delegates not to include in the document they were crafting a religious test for holding public office. This was the only petition concerning religious liberty submitted to the Constitutional Convention.25 Jews were among those in attendance at President George Washington’s inauguration when he took the oath of office on April 30, 1789. The most notable of these was Gershom Mendes Seixas, the American-born spiritual leader of Congregation Shearith Israel, New York City’s most venerable synagogue. Seixas, who “led his New York congregation in special services to mark the adoption of the new federal Constitution,” was one of the fourteen clergymen who took 21 Ibid, 130. 22 Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots, 36; and Chernow, Washington, 702. 23 Beth S. Wenger, History Lessons: The Creation of American Jewish Heritage (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 183. 24 David G. Dalin and Alfred J. Kolatch, The Presidents of the United States and the Jews (Middle Village, NY: Jonathan David Publishers, 2000), 6; Jacob Rader Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776–1985 (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1989), 1:66–177. 25 Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights, 374–375; Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 72–74.

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part in the inaugural ceremonies.26 In the fall of 1776, when the British occupied New York, Seixas, along with many members of his congregation, fled the city, “[t]aking their Torah scroll and other ritual objects with them,” and relocated to Philadelphia.27 The flight of Seixas and most of his Shearith Israel congregation to Philadelphia, Hasia R. Diner noted, demonstrated to many “Jewish support for the revolutionary cause.”28 In his sermons throughout the War of Independence, Seixas “regularly called on God to bless the Revolution, the Congress and George Washington.”29 When Seixas and his congregation returned to New York City at the war’s end, he was acclaimed and admired by Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and other prominent New Yorkers as the city’s preeminent Jewish leader of the revolutionary cause. No other Jewish leader of this era mingled so easily with the Protestant leaders of the American founding.30 As Vincent Phillip Munoz observed, “[m]ost scholars assume that on matters of religious liberty Thomas Jefferson and James Madison speak for the founding generation. George Washington, however, was no less dedicated to securing religious freedom than his second and third presidential successors.”31 Indeed, religious liberty “was a cardinal principle of Washington’s political philosophy.”32 In a 1783 letter, Washington wrote, “[t]he establishment of Civil and Religious Liberty was the Motive that induced me to the field [of battle].”33

26 Feldman, Dual Destinies, 83. 27 Hasia R. Diner, The Jews of the United States, 1654 to 2000 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 47–48. 28 Ibid., 48. 29 Michael Feldberg, ed., Blessings of Freedom: Chapters in American Jewish History (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., in association with the American Jewish Historical Society, 2002), 25. 30 Seixas was the most prominent Jewish religious leader in America and “more fully integrated into New York society than any Jewish clergyman was ever to be until the twentieth century.” Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America, 71. 31 Vincent Phillip Munoz, “Religion and the Common Good: George Washington on Church and State,” in The Founders on God and Government, ed. Daniel L. Dreisbach, Mark D. Hall, and Jeffry H. Morrison (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 1. 32 Lee M. Friedman, “George Washington and Jews of His Day,” in Jewish Pioneers and Patriots, ed. Lee M. Friedman (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1942), 20. 33 George Washington to the Ministers, Elders, Deacons, and Members of the Reformed German Congregation of New York, November 27, 1783, in The Writings of George Washington, ed. John C. Fitzpatrick, 37 vols. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1931– 1940), 27:249.

1. The Founding Fathers and American Jew

When he became president in 1789, Washington gave public recognition to the active role of America’s Jews in furthering the cause of American independence.34 In the months following his inauguration, he received numerous congratulatory letters, including letters from six of the new republic’s Jewish synagogues, to which he replied in correspondence that deserves to be included among the founders’ most important statements on religious liberty and the prudential relationship between religion and the state. Washington’s 1790 letter to the “Hebrew Congregation” of Newport, Rhode Island, today known as the Touro Synagogue, is the most significant. The famed correspondence between George Washington and Jewish Americans, Jonathan D. Sarna noted, went far to define “the place of Judaism in the new nation.”35 It commenced with an address from the Hebrew congregation in Newport to the new president, “composed for his visit to that city on August 17, 1790, following Rhode Island’s ratification of the Constitution.” The Rhode Island Jews “noted past discrimination against Jews, praised the new government for ‘generously affording to all liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,’ and thanked God ‘for all of the blessings of civil and religious liberty’ that Jews now enjoyed under the Constitution.”36 Washington’s eloquent reply is worth quoting at length: The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it were the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support. It would be inconsistent with the frankness of my character not to avow that I am pleased with your favorable opinion of my Administration, and fervent wishes for my felicity. May the Children of the stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while everyone shall sit in safety under his

34 Hirschfeld, George Washington and the Jews, 15. 35 Sarna, American Judaism, 38. This correspondence is also discussed in Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 77–78. 36 Sarna, American Judaism, 38.

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own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid. May the father of all mercies scatter light and not darkness in our paths, and make us all in our several vocations useful here, and in his own due time and way everlastingly happy.37

Washington’s missive to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport is a foundation stone of religious liberty and equality in America. The new president “made history by extending the definition of American religious legitimacy beyond Christians[,] . . . declaring [in his correspondence with the Newport congregation] full religious equality for Jews.”38

Alexander Hamilton Alexander Hamilton was born in 1755 on the island of Nevis in the British West Indies. During the eighteenth century, according to Chernow, “Nevis had a thriving population of Sephardic Jews, many of whom had escaped persecution in Brazil and entered the local sugar trade.”39 By the 1720s, the Jews of Nevis had “created a synagogue, a school, and a well-kept cemetery that survives to this day.”40 Hamilton’s mother, Rachel, was the daughter of physician John Faucette, “a French Huguenot who emigrated to the West Indies in consequence of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.”41 Rachel Faucette’s first marriage was to Johann Michael Lavien. Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow noted that Lavien “can be a Sephardic variant of Levine.”42 “[B]ut if he was Jewish,” as he is generally believed to have been, Chernow continued, Lavien may have hidden his origins from Rachel’s family, who “would certainly have squelched the match in a world that frowned on religious no less than interracial marriage.”43 Their marriage, never a happy one, lasted only a few years. After the couple separated, Rachel began living with a Scotsman, James Hamilton, whom she 37 George Washington to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport, Rhode Island, August 18, 1790, in Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights, 464. 38 Waldman, Founding Faith, 163–164. 39 Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 17. 40 Ibid.; see also Malcom H. Stern, “Some Notes on the Jews of Nevis,” American Jewish Archives 10 (October 1958): 151–159. 41 Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 8, quoting Hamilton. 42 Ibid., 10. 43 Ibid.

1. The Founding Fathers and American Jew

apparently never married, and subsequently gave birth to Alexander on January 11, 1755. Divorce, Hamilton’s biographer observed, “was a novelty in the eighteenth century. To obtain one in the Crown colonies was an expensive, tortuous affair, and this deprived James and Rachel of any chance to legitimize their match.”44 Hamilton’s birth was thus viewed as illegitimate by the Anglican Church, which “could not offer full acceptance of the situation . . . [and] denied Alexander membership or education in the church school on Nevis.”45 With his illegitimate birth thus barring him from an Anglican school, Hamilton was educated by Jewish teachers in the small Sephardic Jewish school on Nevis, where he was tutored in Hebrew and, as his son would later recall, even “taught to repeat the Decalogue in Hebrew, at the school of a Jewess.”46 “Perhaps from this exposure at an impressionable age,” Chernow suggested, “Hamilton harbored a lifelong reverence for Jews.”47 In later years, Hamilton would write admiringly that the Jews were a people whose history was “entirely out of the ordinary course of human affairs” and “the effect of some great providential plan.”48 He later argued, “Why distrust the evidence of the Jews? Discredit them and you destroy the Christian religion. Were not the [ Jews] witnesses of the pure and holy, happy and heaven-approved faith, converts to that faith?”49 In 1784, when Hamilton drafted the new charter of his alma mater King’s College (which soon came to be known as Columbia College), he “saw to it that all clergymen” were on its new Board of Regents, including “the local rabbi” Gershom Mendes Seixas, whom Hamilton had come to know and admire during the War of Independence.50 In his appointment as a Columbia College Regent, Seixas became the first American Jew to serve on the governing board of an American university.51 Moreover, in drafting Columbia College’s new charter, Hamilton, who supported the Jewish quest for religious liberty and freedom of conscience in the new nation, “had hoped that Columbia College would not

44 Ibid., 16. 45 Yitzchok Levine, “The Jews of Nevis and Alexander Hamilton,” The Jewish Press, May 2, 2007. 46 John C. Hamilton, Life of Alexander Hamilton (Boston, MA: Houghton and Osgood, 1879), 1:42. 47 Chernow, Alexander Hamilton, 18. 48 Ibid., quoting Hamilton. 49 Ibid. 50 Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776–1985, 1:120. 51 Sarna, American Judaism, 40–41.

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compel its students to study religious works,” such as readings in Protestant theology, “to which they could not conscientiously subscribe.”52 Hamilton’s respect for Judaism and for Jews is also attested to by the fact that he was one of the only lawyers among the founding fathers—and many of the founders were lawyers—to serve Jewish clients in his law practice.53 One of Hamilton’s notable Jewish clients, and a member of Gershom Seixas’s congregation, was Isaac Moses, a Philadelphia merchant and patriot who served in the Philadelphia militia during the American Revolution and who, during the 1770s and early 1780s, was “unquestionably the wealthiest Jew in Philadelphia.”54 A close associate and business partner of Robert Morris during the Revolution, Moses “bought bills of credit from Robert Morris to assist the Treasury, then in dire need of ready funds.”55 Moses moved to New York in 1783, where he joined “a group of some thirty merchants who addressed the New York legislature, proposing that the state reward their patriotism and compensate them for their losses by selling the Loyalists’ estates.”56 Among his business ventures in New York “was a partnership with the international trading firm of Samuel and Moses Myers and Marcus Elcan of Richmond, which did business with Amsterdam.”57 In 1785, when the Myers’ firm was “in financial trouble, threatening the credit and solvency of its partner, Isaac Moses,” Moses retained Hamilton as his counsel. Hamilton interceded on Moses’s “behalf with the New York creditors, assuring them that Moses was solvent” and saving Moses from a precarious financial situation.58 With Hamilton continuing as his attorney, Moses emerged from the financial crisis, becoming a charter stockholder of the Bank of New York, and one of the most respected Jewish business leaders in the city.59 When he was fatally wounded by Aaron Burr in 1804, Hamilton was mourned by Isaac Moses and his other clients and friends in Seixas’s synagogue. Seixas, too, in the aftermath of the Burr-Hamilton duel, mourned Hamilton’s

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

Marcus, United States Jewry, 1776–1985, 1:120–121. Idem, “The Handsome Young Priest,” 426, footnote 36. Rezneck, Unrecognized Patriots, 70. Ibid. Ibid., 71. Ibid, 71–72. Ibid., 72. Ibid.

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tragic death, lamenting the fact that “prejudices, whether political or civil[,] . . . have a tendency to foment evil in the land.”60

John Adams Much has been made of John Adams’s admiration for Judaism, his appreciation for Jews, and his interest in Jewish books. Isidore S. Meyer showed that Hebrew biblical and post-biblical sources about the ancient Hebrews influenced Adams’s writings about American legal and constitutional thought. In Adams’s Defense of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America, for example, “copious references are made to the seventeenth-century writings of Algernon Sidney and James Harrington who drew many of their ideas about government from biblical and post-biblical Jewish sources.”61 Also, the extensive correspondence between John Adams and his wife Abigail, in the years preceding and during the American Revolution, is replete with allusions to the Hebrew Psalms and “to the other books of Jewish Scriptures during this critical period of American history.”62 Adams’s interest in Jews and the Hebrew Bible stemmed in part from his association with the Reverend George Duffield, a prominent Presbyterian minister of French Huguenot descent who served as one of the two chaplains to the Continental Congress. During the sessions meeting in Philadelphia in 1776, Adams and other delegates listened regularly to the Reverend Duffield’s sermons. As Meyer noted, “[i]t is interesting to observe how Duffield made use of Jewish Scriptures and how he alluded to the experience of the Jews in his discourses before the signing of the Declaration of Independence and with the advent of peace in 1783.”63 In a May 17, 1776 letter to Abigail, Adams observed: “I have this morning heard Mr. Duffield, upon the signs of the times. He ran a parallel between the case of Israel, and that of America; and between the conduct of Pharaoh, and that of George. . . . He concluded, that the course of events indicated strongly the design of Providence, that we should be separated from Great Britain, &c.”64 With the coming of peace in 1783, Duffield preached an 60 Marcus, “The Handsome Young Priest,” 425. 61 Isidore S. Meyer, “John Adams Writes a Letter,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society, 37 (October 1947): 87. 62 Ibid., 186. 63 Ibid., 189. 64 John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 17, 1776, quoted ibid., 192.

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oft-quoted sermon of thanksgiving in which he referred to the American states as the tribes of Israel and George Washington as the Joshua of the day, and in which he viewed “the hand of God as guiding and guarding the way of the Americans” in their successful War of Independence.65 Adams’s appreciation for Judaism and the contribution of Jews to the making of a better world are most evident in letters he wrote to the Dutch jurist Francis Van der Kemp, whom he had met while a US diplomat in Amsterdam during the early 1780s.66 In a missive dated December 31, 1808, Adams stated that he was appalled by Voltaire’s derogatory attitude toward the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish people. “How is it possible this old Fellow [Voltaire] should represent the Hebrews in such contemptible light?” asked Adams. “They are the most glorious Nation that ever inhabited this Earth. The Romans and their Empire were but a Bauble in comparison of the Jews. They have given Religion to three quarters of the Globe and have influenced the affairs of Mankind more, and more happily than any other Nation ancient or modern.”67 In a subsequent letter to Van der Kemp dated February 16, 1809, Adams wrote: . . . in spite of Bolingbroke and Voltaire, I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize men than any other nation. If I were an atheist, and believed in blind eternal fate, I should still believe that fate had ordained the Jews to be the most essential instrument for civilizing the nations. If I were an atheist of the other sect, who believe, or pretend to believe that all is ordered by chance, I should believe that chance had ordered the Jews to preserve and propagate to all mankind the doctrine of a supreme, intelligent, wise, almighty sovereign of the universe, which I believe to be the great essential principle of all morality, and consequently, of all civilization.68

65 Ibid., 195–196. See also George Duffield, A Sermon Preached in the Third Presbyterian Church, in the City of Philadelphia, on Thursday, December 11, 1783. The Day Appointed by the United States in Congress Assembled, to be Observed as a Day of Thanksgiving, for the Restoration of Peace, and Establishment of our Independence, in the Enjoyment of our Rights and Privileges (Philadelphia, PA: F. Bailey, 1784). 66 David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001), 608. 67 John Adams to F. A. Van der Kemp, December 31, 1808, in Meyer, “John Adams Writes a Letter,” 200; Dalin and Kolatch, The Presidents of the United States and the Jews, 13. 68 John Adams to F. A. Van der Kemp, February 6, 1809, in “In God We Trust”: The Religious Beliefs and Ideas of the American Founding Fathers, ed. Norman Cousins (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), 102–103.

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Adams is perhaps the sole founder who is on record supporting the restoration of the Jews to their own land in Judea. Aware of Adams’s favorable attitude toward Jews, the American Jewish newspaper editor, politician, diplomat, and playwright Mordecai Manuel Noah initiated a correspondence with the former president.69 In 1818, Noah delivered an address at the consecration of the new synagogue building erected by his own Congregation Shearith Israel, in New York City. Noah’s “Discourse” is focused on “the universal history of Jewish persecution at the hands of nondemocratic governments and their nations, and declared that the Jewish people could only live free of oppression when they were reestablished in their own home and could govern themselves.”70 Noah sent a copy of his “Discourse” to Adams, who replied encouragingly, expressing his personal wish that “your Nation may be admitted to all Privileges of Citizens in every Country of the World. This Country has done much, I wish it may do more, and annul every narrow idea in Religion, Government and Commerce. . . . It has pleased the Providence of the ‘first Cause,’ the Universal Cause, that Abraham should give Religion, not only to the Hebrews, but to Christians and Mahometans, the greatest Part of the Modern civilized World.”71 The following year, Noah sent Adams a copy of his recently published book, Travels in England, France, Spain, and the Barbary States. In a letter of thanks acknowledging the gift, Adams praised it as “a magazine of ancient and modern learning of judicious observations and ingenious reflections,” and expressed regret that Noah had not extended his travels to “Syria, Judea and Jerusalem.” Had Noah done so, Adams wrote, he would have attended “more to [his] remarks than to those of any traveler I have yet read,” adding, “Farther I could find it in my heart to wish that you had been the head of a hundred thousand Israelites . . . & marching with them into Judea & making a conquest of that country & restoring your nation to the dominion of it. For I really wish the Jews again in Judea an independent nation.”72

69 The definitive biography of Noah is Jonathan D. Sarna, Jacksonian Jew: The Two Worlds of Mordecai Noah (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, Inc., 1981). 70 Feldberg, Blessings of Freedom, 202–203. 71 John Adams to Mordecai M. Noah, July 31, 1818, quoted ibid., 203. 72 John Adams to Mordecai M. Noah, March 15, 1819, quoted ibid.

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Thomas Jefferson Throughout his life, Thomas Jefferson advocated religious equality and freedom for members of all faiths, including Jews, to whom he frequently referred. Jefferson’s advocacy of civic equality for American Jews began as early as 1776, when he cosponsored a Bill for the Naturalization of Foreigners that, had it been enacted by the Virginia legislature, would have permitted Jews, Catholics, and other non-Protestants to be naturalized as Virginia citizens. Despite Jefferson’s strong endorsement, the bill was not passed by the Virginia Assembly.73 Jefferson eventually won the day when the state legislature passed his famous Statute for Establishing Religious Freedom, which guaranteed “that no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship . . . but that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinions in matters of religion, and that the same shall in no wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capacities.”74 He came to regard his authorship of the Virginia Statute as an achievement “second in importance only to his authorship of the Declaration of Independence.”75 This historic Virginia statute “not only gave full legal equality to Virginia’s Jews (one of whom, two years later, was elected to municipal office), it also set the stage for the Constitution’s provisions on religious freedom.”76 By the time Jefferson assumed the presidency in 1801, his contact with individual Jews and connections with the Jewish community had been minimal. Nonetheless, during his presidency, he appointed Reuben Etting, a Jewish political supporter from Baltimore, US Marshall from Maryland. In doing so, he

73 Bill for the Naturalization of Foreigners, October 14, 1776, in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian P. Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:548, 558–559; Robert M. Healey, “Jefferson on Judaism and the Jews,” American Jewish History 73 (1984): 360; and Feldberg, Blessings of Freedom, 60. 74 Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights, 251. 75 Feldman, Dual Destinies, 42. James Madison, who, as Daniel L. Dreisbach has noted, had “shepherded” Jefferson’s Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom “through the Virginia legislature in the dramatic and rancorous church-state battles of the mid-1780s,” described the Virginia Statute as “a true standard of Religious Liberty” that “circumscribes governmental infringements on religious liberty and rights of conscience.” Daniel L. Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 86. 76 Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 66–67.

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became the first American president to appoint a Jew to a federal government position.77 After leaving the presidency, Jefferson corresponded with a few Jews, “although there is no indication that Jefferson developed a strong friendship with any of them.”78 In 1818, Mordecai Manuel Noah sent Jefferson a copy of the same “Discourse” he had sent to Adams. In his response to Noah, Jefferson wrote: I thank you for the discourse on the consecration of the Synagogue in your city, with which you have been pleased to favor me. I have read it with pleasure and instruction, having learned from it some valuable facts in Jewish history which I did not know before. Your sect by its sufferings has furnished a remarkable proof of the universal spirit of religious intolerance inherent in every sect. Our laws have applied the only antidote to this vice, protecting our religious, as they do our civil rights, by putting all on an equal footing. But more remains to be done, for although we are free by the law, we are not so in practice. Public opinion erects itself into an inquisition, and exercises its office with as much fanaticism fans the flames of an Auto-de-fe.79

In 1820, Jefferson wrote to Dr. Jacob De La Motta, the prominent Savannah physician and Jewish community leader, that “religious freedom is the most effectual anodyne against religious dissention,” and he expressed the hope that American Jews would be afforded equal rights and “will be seen taking their seats on the benches of science as preparatory to their doing the same at the board of government.”80 Jefferson’s genuine concern for the religious freedom of Jews also found expression in a letter, written on January 6, 1826, six months before his death, apparently referring to the then-common practice of reading the King James Bible in schools. Imposing on Jewish youth “in our public seminaries . . . a course of theological reading which their consciences do not permit them to pursue,” Jefferson wrote, was “a cruel addition to the wrongs” that Jews had suffered throughout history.81 77 Jefferson’s appointment of Reuben Etling is discussed in Dalin and Kolatch, The Presidents of the United States and the Jews, 19. 78 Feldman, Dual Destinies, 43. 79 Jefferson to Mordecai M. Noah, May 28, 1818, in Dalin and Kolatch, The Presidents of the United States and the Jews, 19–20. 80 Jefferson to Jacob de la Motta, August 1820, in Dreisbach and Hall, Sacred Rights, 596. 81 Thomas Jefferson to Isaac Harby, January 6, 1826, in The Jews of the United States, 1790–1840: A Documentary History, ed. Joseph L. Blau and Salo W. Baron, 3 vols. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 3:704–705.

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Of all the major founders, Jefferson was the most critical in his attitude toward Judaism. “A product of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, Jefferson considered himself a ‘rational Christian,’” calling himself, among other things, a Unitarian.82 Jefferson’s support for Jewish religious and political equality did not mean that he approved of Judaism as a religion. On the contrary, he shared with other Enlightenment rationalists of his generation a decidedly negative view of the Jewish religion. Although he read widely, his knowledge of Judaism was minimal, and he believed that Judaism had not changed significantly since the time of Moses. As Egal Feldman pointed out, Jefferson was “[c]ritical of Judaism’s claim to a divine revelation, . . . considered its biblical history distorted, its God and law cruel, its form of worship meaningless, and its morality ethnocentric. He attributed to his own Unitarian faith a moral superiority to that of Judaism.”83 Jefferson’s antipathy towards Judaism is reflected in an 1813 letter to John Adams, in which he quoted with approval a scholarly work that asserted: “Ethics were so little understood among the Jews, that in their whole compilation called the Talmud, there is only one treatise on moral subject. What a wretched depravity of sentiment and manners must have prevailed, before such corrupt maxims could have obtained credit! It is impossible to collect from these writings a consistent series of moral doctrine.”84 Similarly, the “vicious ethics” of the Jews,85 Jefferson wrote, “were ‘irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason & morality,’ encouraged poor relationships among people, and were downright ‘repulsive and anti-social, as respecting other nations.’”86 As Jonathan D. Sarna

82 Feldman, Dual Destinies, 42. “In keeping with his rational outlook,” Feldman noted, “Jefferson was disdainful of Presbyterians and unsympathetic toward the Roman Catholic or Anglican priesthood, whom he considered to be the corruptors of the moral message of Jesus.” Ibid. 83 Ibid., 44. 84 Jefferson to John Adams, October 13, 1813, in The Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Adrienne Koch and William Peden (New York: The Modern Library and Random House, 1972), 631. 85 Jefferson to Charles Thomson, January 9, 1816, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert Ellery Bergh, 20 vols. (Washington, DC: The Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1903–1904), 14:386 [hereinafter Writings of Jefferson]. 86 Waldman, Founding Faith, 75, quoting Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus,” in Koch and Peden, Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 569.

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aptly put it, Jefferson “continued to think Jews morally depraved.”87 Jefferson’s complaints extended even to the Jewish conception of God. In his “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus,” he described the Jewish idea of God and his attributes as “degrading and injurious.”88 Elsewhere in his correspondence, he depicted the Jewish God as “cruel, vindictive, capricious, and unjust.”89 Finally, in a letter to Ezra Stiles, the noted Hebraist and president of Yale University, he attacked Jewish theology, “which supposes the God of infinite justice to punish the sins of the fathers upon their children, unto the third and fourth generation.”90 “To an extent rarely acknowledged,” Steven Waldman opined, Jefferson “despised . . . the Jews of the Old Testament and the religion it seemed to spawn.”91 Although his “negative attitude about Judaism seemed mostly confined to antiquity, he occasionally revealed an up-todate bias.”92 It is not clear that Jefferson was antisemitic per se, given that he was critical of all but Enlightened forms of religion. In any case, he departed from the admiration most of his colleagues had for Judaism.

Conclusion George Washington was the first president to visit a synagogue and correspond with American Jews. When, in his historic 1790 response to the Rhode Island Jews, Washington issued the stirring assurance that “the government of the United States . . . gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” he “acknowledged not only the principle of religious freedom, but also that Jews were citizens-the first time anywhere for a head of state to do so.”93 In visiting a synagogue, Washington set a precedent that future presidents—including 87 Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Anti-Semitism,” in History and Hate: The Dimensions of AntiSemitism, ed. David Berger (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1986), 121. 88 Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus,” in Koch and Peden, Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 569. 89 Jefferson to William Short, August 4, 1820, in Writings of Jefferson, 15:260. 90 Jefferson to Ezra Stiles, June 25, 1819, in Writings of Jefferson, 15:203; Jonathan D. Sarna, “The ‘Mythical Jew’ and the ‘Jew Next Door’ in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Anti-Semitism in American History, ed. David A. Gerber (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986), 59. 91 Waldman, Founding Faith, 75. 92 Ibid. 93 Eli Faber, The Jewish People in America: A Time for Planting: The First Migration, 1654–1820 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 129.

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Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton, among others—would follow. The relationship of the founders to America’s Jews was one of both admiration and ambivalence. With the exception of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, none of the famous founders knew Jews personally, socialized with Jews, or counted Jews among their close acquaintances or friends. “John Adams’s interest in the Jewish people,” Egal Feldman asserted, “grew out of his knowledge of their biblical past, somewhat tempered by democratic ideas of the revolutionary age.”94 His affection for Jews apparently was a product of his reverence for the ancient Hebrews and their three thousand years of history. For Adams, as for some of the other Christian leaders of the new American republic, it was the idealized or “mythical” Jew of Hebrew Scripture, rather than the contemporary reality, that inspired his admiration for Judaism and its people. Adams knew no Jews personally, had no Jewish clients in his Boston law practice, and had no Jewish neighbors or friends.95 To be sure, he was a Christian Zionist who expressed support for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. And yet, Adams’s well-known sympathy for Zionism, as articulated in his correspondence with Mordecai Noah, was predicated on the theological hope and presupposition that a Jewish homeland in Palestine would hasten the conversion of Jews to Christianity. “Once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted,” wrote Adams, the Jews “would soon wear away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character & possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians.”96 Although a champion of religious liberty for Jews and other religious minorities and a staunch defender of the wall of separation between church and state, Thomas Jefferson, of all the founders, had the least favorable—indeed, most harshly critical—view of Judaism. In his “Syllabus,” which he sent to Benjamin Rush in 1803, Jefferson accused Jews of having a “degrading and injurious” understanding of God and contended that their view of ethics was “imperfect” and 94 Feldman, Dual Destinies, 47. 95 This point has been suggested by Peter Grose in Israel in the Mind of America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983), 6, and Jonathan D. Sarna in “The ‘Mythical Jew’ and the ‘Jew Next Door.’” 96 John Adams to Mordecai M. Noah, March 15, 1819, quoted in William Pencak, “Anti-Semitism, Toleration, and Appreciation: The Changing Relations of Jews and Gentiles in Early America,” in The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Intolerance in Early America, ed. Chris Beneke and Christopher S. Grenda (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 260.

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“irreconcilable with the sound dictates of reason and morality.”97 Jews “needed reformation in an eminent degree,” Jefferson wrote, a view implicitly shared by others in the founding generation.98 Jefferson never invited Jews to his home, Monticello. Like Adams, Jefferson had no Jewish neighbors or friends. Of all the founders discussed in this essay, Alexander Hamilton had the closest connection to Jews, a connection that went back to his childhood. More than any prominent founder, he had an admiration for Judaism and for the contribution of Jews to civilization. “For Alexander Hamilton, an Episcopalian who had learned to read Hebrew in his youth,” Michael Oren remarked, “the destiny of America was not unlike that of the Jews.”99 While a great deal has been written about the history of the American Jewish political experience generally, comparatively little has been written about the relationship between the founding fathers and America’s Jews. Both as individuals and as a community, Jews play a relatively insignificant role (when they play any role at all) in the standard biographies of most founders.100 Indeed, in some of the most acclaimed biographies of the founding fathers, Jews are not mentioned at all.101 Ron Chernow’s recent prize-winning biographies of Hamilton and Washington are welcomed exceptions to this pattern. This writer hopes that future scholarship will give more attention to and analysis of the founders’ views on Jews and on Judaism, and on the relationship between the American founders and Jews.

97 Jefferson to Benjamin Rush, April 21, 1803, “Syllabus of an Estimate of the Merit of the Doctrines of Jesus,” in Koch and Peden, Life and Selected Writings of Thomas Jefferson, 569. 98 Ibid. 99 Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York: W. W. Norton, 2007), 85. 100 This important point has been made, with particular reference to biographies of Thomas Jefferson, by Healey in his article, “Jefferson on Judaism and the Jews,” 361. 101 To cite but a few examples: Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993); idem, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York: Vintage Books, 1998) (winner of the National Book Award); idem, His Excellency: George Washington (New York: Vintage Books, 2004); Richard Norton Smith, Patriarch: George Washington and the New American Nation (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1993); and Richard Brookhiser, Alexander Hamilton, American (New York: The Free Press, 1999).

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Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews* When Vice President Al Gore named Joseph Lieberman as his vice-presidential nominee on the eve of the 2000 Democratic National Convention, Jews throughout the country swelled with pride. “Did you think you would live to see this day?” An observant Jew stood on the brink of holding our nation’s secondhighest office. In truth, the Lieberman nomination represented the next step—a large step, to be sure—in what has been an impressive history of Jews serving their country in the executive branch. The number of Jews serving in early administrations was extremely small, but they effectively represented Jewish interests. Historic strides were taken at the turn into the twentieth century, with the appointment of Oscar Straus as the first Jewish member of a president’s cabinet. The progression since then has been steady and persistent until we reached the point, in the Clinton administration, at which no position was thought unusual for a Jewish public servant. The Lieberman nomination was historic—as all firsts are by definition—but the groundwork had been set by early in the twentieth century for Jews serving at the pleasure of the presidents of the United States.

Nineteenth-Century Presidential Appointees The tradition of Jews receiving presidential appointments is almost as old as the nation itself. For much of the nation’s first century, those Jews who received presidential appointments represented the United States in diplomatic posts. Presidents James Madison and James Monroe, for example, appointed Jews to several consular posts. The best known of President Madison’s Jewish appointments was political journalist Mordecai Noah who, in 1813, was appointed US consul to Tu*

“Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews” was published in Jews in American Politics, ed. L. Sandy Maisel and Ira N. Forman (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2001). Reprinted by permission of Rowman and Littlefield, all rights reserved.

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nis. According to Jonathan Sarna and David Dalin, Noah lobbied for the job as a Jew and won appointment, in part, “because it was hoped that he might establish beneficial ties with North Africa’s powerful Jewish community.” The Muslim rulers of Tunis, however, later protested his appointment because they did not want to deal with a Jew. As a result, the State Department decided to recall Noah. “At the time of your appointment as Consul of Tunis,” Secretary of State Monroe wrote him, “it was not known that the religion which you profess would form any obstacle to the exercise of your Consular functions. Recent information, however . . . proves that it would produce a very unfavourable effect.” Sarna has noted that the Madison administration had other compelling reasons for wanting to recall Noah, but President Madison explained his reason for rescinding Noah’s appointment as being, “the ascertained prejudice of the Turks against his Religion, and it having become public that he was a Jew.” Most Jews took President Madison at his word, believing that anti-Jewish prejudice lay behind Noah’s recall. To this day, Madison’s recall of Noah remains the only instance in American history in which overt antisemitism was a factor in the rescinding of a presidential appointment of a Jew. These appointments from the small, rather isolated American Jewish community of the early eighteenth century were the exception, not the rule. The next major Jewish presidential appointment was made by Franklin Pierce, who named August Belmont, the influential financier and Democratic Party fundraiser, to the post of US minister to the Hague. As the first Jew to hold this high rank in the American diplomatic service, Belmont represented the United States in the Netherlands from 1853 to 1857. In the fall of 1857, United States Senator Judah Benjamin turned down an offer from President James Buchanan to appoint him US minister to Spain. Five years earlier Benjamin had also declined President Millard Fillmore’s offer of a seat on the Supreme Court. When Louisiana seceded from the Union in February 1861, however, Benjamin, a passionate southerner, resigned his Senate seat. Soon thereafter, Confederate President Jefferson Davis appointed Benjamin attorney general of the Confederacy, making him the first Jew to hold a cabinet-level office in any American government. He subsequently served as the Confederacy’s secretary of war and secretary of state. Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the nineteenth century, almost all Jews who received presidential appointments were nominated for diplomatic posts. Often their religion was important in the decision to appoint them to particular posts. In 1870, President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Benjamin Franklin Peixotto, a prominent San Francisco attorney and Jewish communal

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leader, US consul to Bucharest, Romania. In sending Peixotto to Bucharest, which was then a hotbed of virulent antisemitism, Grant endorsed the new consul’s intention to use the American consulate to promote Jewish rights and political emancipation in Romania. Max Kohler and Simon Wolf cite a letter that Peixotto carried with him from President Grant to Prince Charles of Romania: The bearer of this letter, Mr. Benjamin Peixotto . . . has undertaken the duties of this present office more as a missionary work for the benefit of the people he represents who are laboring under severe oppression than for any benefits to accrue to himself. The United States, knowing no distinction of her own citizens on account of religion or nativity, naturally believes in a civilization the world over which will secure the same universal views.

Active in Republican presidential campaigns, Peixotto was later named US consul to Lyons, France, where he served throughout the Garfield and Arthur administrations. In 1887, President Grover Cleveland appointed Oscar S. Straus US minister to Turkey, the second Jew to hold this rank in the American diplomatic service. With the financial help of his brothers Isidor and Nathan (who in 1888 became partners in, and later sole owners of, New York City’s famed R. H. Macy’s Department Store), Oscar Straus was able to devote his life to public service. In 1882, he entered politics as leader of a citizens’ movement dedicated to municipal reform. Two years later, he played an active role in Cleveland’s presidential campaign, speaking widely on his behalf. When Straus’s appointment to Turkey was announced, detractors pointed out that part of the US minister’s role in Constantinople was the protection of Christian missionaries and Christian colleges. Several Protestant clergy, however, actively supported the appointment of a Jew, including the enormously popular Brooklyn preacher Henry Ward Beecher, who wrote to President Cleveland, “The bitter prejudice against Jews, which obtains in many parts of Europe, ought not to receive any countenance in America. It is because he is a Jew that I would urge his appointment as a fit recognition of this remarkable people who . . . deserve and should receive from our government such recognition.” Straus was an immensely successful and popular minister to Turkey. His gift for diplomacy enabled him to win an invitation from the sultan to arbitrate a business dispute between the Turkish government and Baron Maurice de Hirsch, the Jewish financier and philanthropist who had built the first railroad connecting Constantinople to the cities of Europe.

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In appointing Oscar Straus the first Jewish US minister to Turkey, President Cleveland established a precedent that every president—Republican and Democrat alike—would follow during the next thirty years. Presidents Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson each appointed Jewish ministers (and, later, ambassadors) to Constantinople. American presidents recognized the symbolic importance of the Turkish embassy for American Jews, and especially for the growing number of Zionists within the American Jewish electorate, since the Jewish homeland of Palestine remained under the direct control of the Turkish government. During this era, the ambassadorship to Turkey came to be considered a quasi-Jewish domain. Although Straus had resigned his ambassadorship following Cleveland’s defeat for reelection in 1888, he remained a close friend and political confidant of the ex-president, helping renominate him at the Democratic National Convention of 1892. As a member of Cleveland’s “kitchen cabinet” during his second term, Straus was a frequent guest at the White House, offering advice on monetary policy and immigration, issues of Jewish concern. However, as an advocate of “sound money” and of the gold standard that the Republican Party championed, Straus opposed the Democrats’ nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 and broke with his former party, actively campaigning for William McKinley. With McKinley’s election, Straus again had easy access to the White House; he advised McKinley on a variety of issues relating to international diplomacy and foreign affairs. In 1898, McKinley asked Straus to resume his former post as minister to Turkey. In the aftermath of the 1897 Turkish massacre of Armenians, American relations with Turkey had deteriorated. The Turkish sultan refused American claims for property destroyed during the massacres, and American citizens in Turkey called for American warships to back up their claims. Dalin and Kolatch suggest that in asking Straus to return to Turkey, President McKinley told Straus that it was his duty to return as “the only man in the United States who could save the situation.” Straus returned as US minister to Turkey for more than two years. Throughout the nineteenth century, the few Jews who received presidential appointments were chosen because of their personal connections to the presidents; they were asked to serve in posts deemed especially appropriate for Jews. While no Jews served in high-level administration posts, a number of Jewish leaders, including Joseph Seligman in the Grant administration, and both Oscar Straus and his older brother Isidor in the Cleveland administrations, were important presidential advisers. The movement of Jews from the periphery of

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executive branch power to the center awaited the turn of the century and the administration of Theodore Roosevelt.

A Historic First: The Cabinet Appointment of Oscar S. Straus In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Oscar S. Straus as secretary of commerce and labor, the first Jew named to a president’s cabinet. Roosevelt, who also appointed the first Catholic cabinet officer, Charles C. Bonaparte, his secretary of the Navy (then a cabinet portfolio), introduced more religious diversity into presidential cabinet making than had any of his predecessors. When Theodore Roosevelt assumed the presidency after the McKinley assassination, Straus, who had known Roosevelt for several years, soon became a close political adviser. In 1902, Roosevelt appointed Straus a member of the Permanent International Court of Arbitration at the Hague. A few months after Roosevelt’s 1904 election, speculation that Roosevelt planned to name Straus to the post of commerce and labor was rampant in Washington. When Straus visited the White House in January 1906, the president confirmed the report. While Straus’s ability and experience certainly were factors in Roosevelt’s decision to appoint him to the cabinet, so too was his religion. Straus related the following comment made to him by the president: “I don’t know whether you know it or not, but I want you to become a member of my Cabinet. I have a very high estimate of your character, your judgment, and your ability, and I want you for personal reasons. There is still a further reason: I want to show Russia and some other countries what we think of Jews in this country.” A number of ingredients are always involved in presidential cabinet appointments. The criteria of objective merit or ability often compete with the need for achieving both geographic and religious “representation” or balance in the selection process. In the case of Roosevelt’s selection of Straus, analysts continue to debate whether the Jewish appointee was selected primarily on the basis of merit or, rather, because he was a Jew. Straus’s biographer, Naomi W. Cohen, has noted that, in 1912, newspaper reports circulated that at a public dinner the previous year, at which both Roosevelt and Straus were speakers, the Jewish financier and philanthropist Jacob Schiff, one of the preeminent Jewish Republicans in America, had introduced Roosevelt, remarking that American Jews owed him a debt of gratitude because of his historic appointment of Straus. In his remarks, Roosevelt had stated that Straus had been appointed on the basis of merit and ability alone; the fact that he was Jewish had played no part in Roosevelt’s

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decision to appoint him. A few minutes later, in introducing Straus, Schiff, who was a bit deaf and had evidently not heard Roosevelt’s remarks, recounted how Roosevelt had sought his advice as to who would be the most suitable and eminent Jewish leader to appoint to his cabinet. Roosevelt’s selection of Straus probably involved both the nominee’s proven ability as a successful businessman, diplomat, and public servant and his religion and reputation as a respected Jewish communal leader. Clearly, Roosevelt wanted to make a Jewish appointment in 1906. He had appointed a Catholic to his cabinet the year before and sought an opportunity to appoint a Jew. As Naomi W. Cohen has concluded, while he upheld the Progressive ideal of appointments on the basis of merit and ability alone, he had an “equally strong . . . desire to show American Catholics and American Jews that they had the same opportunities as others.” Theodore Roosevelt’s appointment of Oscar Straus received wide and favorable coverage in the nation’s press. As the first Jewish cabinet member, Straus’s religion evoked more press comment that it had on the occasion of his other appointments. Cohen has noted that many newspapers used his appointment “as a point of departure to praise the contributions of the Jews in the United States, to express surprise that no Jew had filled a cabinet post heretofore, to laud T. R.’s liberalism, and to discuss the official posts filled by Jews in America and in foreign countries.” In the twenty-eight years between Theodore Roosevelt’s appointment of Oscar Straus and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s appointment of Henry J. Morgenthau Jr. in 1934, no Jews served in any presidential cabinets. Jewish influence remained informal. For example, Woodrow Wilson relied on the advice of financier and philanthropist Bernard Baruch and consulted with Louis Brandeis, whom he would eventually name as the first Jew on the Supreme Court. President Hoover wanted to appoint his friend Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck, and Company and one of the preeminent Jewish philanthropists in America, as secretary of commerce, but his desire was thwarted by Rosenwald’s wish to stay in his Chicago home because of his age and failing health.

Increased Presence in the Executive Branch: FDR and Truman During his twelve years in the White House, Franklin Roosevelt appointed more Jews to public office than had all previous presidents combined. Although he named only one Jew to his cabinet, according to Geoffrey Ward, more than

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fifteen percent of Roosevelt’s top­level appointees were Jews. Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter, whom FDR appointed to the Supreme Court in 1939, was an important Roosevelt adviser and political confidant from the beginning of his administration. Not only did Frankfurter play a central role in drafting New Deal legislation and in formulating New Deal programs, but he also sent many of his brightest Jewish Harvard Law School students to Washington, where they found work in various New Deal agencies. Benjamin Ginsberg claims that Jews were especially prominent in the Department of Interior. Upon the advice of Frankfurter, Nathan Margold was appointed Interior Department solicitor. Abe Fortas, who would be appointed to the Supreme Court by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, began his public career in the 1930s as a young lawyer in the Interior Department, serving first as director of the department’s Division of Manpower and later as undersecretary. Felix Cohen, a New York attorney, wrote the Interior Department’s legislation concerning Native Americans. Jewish attorneys were also appointed to influential positions in the Department of Labor, the Security and Exchange Commission, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and several other New Deal agencies. Among the several Jews who were appointed to ambassadorships by FDR, Jesse Isidor Straus, the nephew of Oscar Straus, was named ambassador to France, where he served from 1933 to 1936. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s closest Jewish friend and his one Jewish cabinet appointee was Henry Morgenthau Jr., who served as secretary of the treasury from 1934 to 1945. Morgenthau’s father had served as finance chairman of the Democratic National Committee during Woodrow Wilson’s 1912 and 1916 campaigns and as ambassador to Turkey from 1913 to 1916. Independently wealthy and a Democratic Party activist, Morgenthau Jr. had become a gentleman farmer, growing apples and raising dairy cattle on a thousand-acre farm in Duchess County, New York, not far from the Roosevelt estate at Hyde Park. As neighbors, Henry and Elinor Morgenthau and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt became fast friends; the Morgenthaus were among the earliest supporters of FDR’s candidacy for governor of New York in 1928. During the 1928 gubernatorial campaign, Morgenthau, who had become a prominent figure in New York state agricultural circles, advised Roosevelt on agricultural policy. After his election in 1928, Roosevelt appointed Morgenthau chairman of the newly created New York State Agricultural Advisory Commission, the first of several important positions that Morgenthau would hold under FDR as governor and president.

2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews

With Roosevelt’s election to the presidency, Morgenthau had hoped for a cabinet appointment as secretary of agriculture, a position for which he was, by experience and ability, well qualified. However, FDR conformed with the long tradition of appointing an agriculture secretary from the heart of the nation’s farmland, far west of Duchess County, New York. Morgenthau was sorely disappointed at being passed over for a cabinet post. According to George McJimsey, however, Roosevelt “soothed Morgenthau’s hurt feelings at not being named Secretary of Agriculture by naming him to head the new Farm Credit Administration,” one of the three New Deal agencies established by Congress to provide credit to America’s farmers. In the first year of the Roosevelt presidency, FDR’s first secretary of the treasury, William Woodin, became fatally ill; the undersecretary of the treasury, Dean Acheson, became the acting head of the Treasury Department but resigned within a few months over policy differences with FDR. The president turned to Morgenthau. After serving briefly as acting secretary, Morgenthau was appointed secretary of the treasury, the second Jew to serve in a president’s cabinet. As FDR’s secretary of the treasury from 1934 to 1945, Henry Morgenthau Jr. was the longest-serving treasury secretary and the longest-serving Jewish cabinet member in US history. Another of Roosevelt’s closest political confidants and most trusted advisers was Samuel Rosenman. When Roosevelt was elected governor of New York in 1928, Rosenman, who had served for four years as a member of the New York State legislature, joined his staff in Albany as a speechwriter and special legal counsel. It was Rosenman who, in 1932, is credited with first bringing together the distinguished group of academic experts known as the “Brain Trust.” He also is credited with coining the phrase “New Deal.” While serving as a New York State Supreme Court justice from 1934 to 1943, Rosenman continued to advise Roosevelt on an informal basis. In August 1941, Roosevelt asked Rosenman to draft a reorganization plan to prepare the government for wartime production. Rosenman’s plan resulted in the creation of the Supply, Priorities, and Allocations Board. Subsequently, Rosenman played a major role in creating the National Housing Authority, the War Manpower Commission, the Office of War Information, and the Office of Economic Stabilization. In September 1943, Rosenman resigned his judicial post to serve on the White House staff as special counsel to the president, a position in which he continued to serve President Truman for a year after FDR’s death. Another close Roosevelt adviser was David K. Niles, who joined the White House staff as assistant to the president in 1942. Sometimes referred to as

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Roosevelt’s “House Jew,” Niles was the president’s unofficial liaison to the Jewish community. According to Michael Cohen, he advised the president “which Jewish leaders to receive and which might be rejected politely without causing too much political damage.” He was the first of a series of special assistants assigned to liaison between the president and the Jewish community. Like Rosenman, Niles stayed on with President Truman after FDR’s death. As a special assistant to the president, he had a major influence on Truman’s decision to recognize Israel. A third important Jewish member of FDR’s White House staff was Benjamin V. Cohen, one of the most talented of Felix Frankfurter’s protégés. Serving on the White House staff as a speechwriter, Cohen was instrumental in writing several major pieces of New Deal legislation, including the Security and Exchange Act of 1934, the Federal Communications Act, and the Minimum Wage Act. More than occasionally, Cohen would leave the White House to lobby for New Deal programs on Capitol Hill in the days before the White House had an official Office of Congressional Liaison. While President Truman used several Jewish advisers on his White House staff, he did not appoint any Jews to his cabinet, the only Democratic president after FDR not to have done so. One of Truman’s latter appointments, Lewis L. Strauss, an influential investment banker and Jewish communal leader, and a Republican when he was appointed to the newly created Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), would become quite controversial in the Eisenhower years.

Decreased Presence in the Eisenhower Years No Jews played prominent roles in the Eisenhower administration. Few of his top-level appointees and only one prominent member of the White House staff, Maxwell Rabb, were Jewish. Rabb was assistant to the president in charge of civil rights, immigration, and labor problems; he helped shepherd the Refugee Relief Act of 1953 through Congress. Rabb also served as secretary to Eisenhower’s cabinet from 1956 to 1958. He continued the tradition of having a Jewish member of the White House staff serve as liaison to the Jewish community. But the Jewish appointment that was most controversial in the Eisenhower administration was one that was never confirmed. Eisenhower had elevated Lewis Strauss, the Truman appointee, to the chairmanship of the AEC in 195S. For the next five years Strauss was the most influential shaper of US atomic energy policy. On October 24, 1958, President Eisenhower nominated Strauss as secretary of commerce, the only Jewish Cabinet designee of this administration.

2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews

When the Strauss nomination was sent to Congress for confirmation in January 1959, however, it met the strong and unrelenting opposition of the Democraticcontrolled Senate. The opposition was based on the public controversy, during Strauss’s tenure as chairman of the AEC, over his prominent role in the revocation of the commission’s security clearance to J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb and one of the nation’s most eminent physicists. Oppenheimer had allegedly had past associations with communists; he was also suspect because of continued opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. At Strauss’s urging, the AEC ruled that Oppenheimer was a security risk and denied him access to classified information on US atomic energy policy. As chairman of the AEC, Strauss had also repeatedly failed to respond to the requests of the Joint Atomic Energy Committee for information. According to G. Calvin Mackenzie, Strauss had “so infuriated the Senate in this and his evasiveness at his confirmation hearing that it took the highly unusual step of refusing to confirm a nomination to the President’s Cabinet.” In June of 1959, Strauss’s nomination as secretary of commerce was defeated by a Senate vote of forty-nine to forty-six, the only Jewish cabinet nomination to be denied Senate confirmation.

The Kennedy and Johnson Years: Jews as Part of the White House Team President Kennedy was the first American President to name two Jews to his cabinet, Abraham Ribicoff and Arthur Goldberg. He and his successor Lyndon Johnson also used a large number of Jews in advisory capacities. One of the most popular vote getters in Connecticut history, Ribicoff is the only American Jew to have served in both houses of Congress, as governor of his state, and as a member of a president’s cabinet. Ribicoff and Kennedy first met after Ribicoff ’s election to Congress in 1948. During the four years when they were both young Democratic congressmen from neighboring New England states, Ribicoff and Kennedy became close friends and political allies. In 1954, when Ribicoff was running for the Democratic nomination for governor of Connecticut, Senator John F. Kennedy gave the keynote address at the Democratic state convention at which Ribicoff was nominated. At the Democratic National Convention in 1956, Ribicoff delivered the speech nominating Kennedy for vice president. In 1960, Ribicoff played a pivotal role in Kennedy’s campaign, serving as convention floor manager at the Democratic National Convention. After

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Kennedy’s election, Ribicoff was offered his choice of cabinet positions; he selected secretary of health, education, and welfare (HEW). While secretary of HEW, Ribicoff drafted the original Medicare plan, which was defeated after intense lobbying by the American Medical Association. In 1962, after only sixteen months in the Kennedy cabinet, Ribicoff returned to Connecticut to run successfully for a seat in the United States Senate. A native of Chicago and 1930 graduate of Northwestern University Law School, Arthur Goldberg had specialized in labor law and had earned a reputation as the preeminent labor lawyer in the United States. In 1948, Goldberg became general counsel for the Congress of lndustrial Organizations (CIO) and helped draft the historic agreement merging the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO in 1955. For the next six years, before joining the Kennedy administration, Goldberg served as special counsel to the AFL-CIO. Kennedy had first met Goldberg during the Senate’s consideration of labor legislation during the late 1950s and had been impressed. Indeed, as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. has recalled, Kennedy thought so highly of Goldberg, who was an early supporter of Kennedy’s candidacy, that his appointment to the Labor post was almost inevitable. In 1962, when Felix Frankfurter announced his retirement from the Supreme Court, President Kennedy appointed Goldberg to fill the vacancy on the high court. No one would deny the symbolic importance to Jews of Ribicoff ’s and Goldberg’s simultaneous service in JFK’s cabinet. But perhaps more important, in terms of the overall role of Jews in American politics, was the fact that the Jewish role and influence increased significantly on the White House staff and in subcabinet appointments during the Kennedy and Johnson years. Walt W. Rostow, who had been a distinguished professor of economics at MIT and author of several influential books on economic history and international affairs, was appointed deputy special assistant for national security affairs in 1961. When his boss, McGeorge Bundy, left the White House in 1966, Rostow became President Johnson’s special assistant for national security affairs, the first Jew to hold the position of chief national security adviser. Myer Feldman, a Washington lawyer who had handled Israeli and Jewish affairs on JFK’s Senate staff, was appointed a deputy special counsel when Kennedy became president. In that capacity, he held the “Jewish portfolio” that David K. Niles had under FDR and Truman. In 1961, Kennedy sent Feldman on a secret mission to Tel Aviv to promise Israel protection by the US Sixth Fleet and to arrange the sale of Hawk anti­aircraft missiles that the Eisenhower administration had previously refused to sell to Israel. He had played a key role in reversing the Eisenhower administration’s decision. Shortly after Lyndon Johnson

2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews

succeeded to the presidency, Feldman replaced Theodore C. Sorenson as special counsel to President Johnson, a position that he would hold for close to two years. As such, Feldman was one of seven Jews to hold that portfolio in the last third of the twentieth century. Richard N. Goodwin had joined John F. Kennedy’s Senate staff as a speechwriter in 1959. During the Kennedy presidential campaign, Goodwin wrote speeches on Latin America, coining the term “Alliance for Progress.” Subsequently, he served on the White House staff as a speechwriter before being appointed deputy assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs. He rejoined the White House staff during the Johnson administration as a speechwriter on Latin American and urban affairs and is credited with having originated the term “the Great Society.” Jerome B. Wiesner, a professor of electrical engineering at MIT, who had been a member of President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee, was appointed special assistant for science and technology by Kennedy in 1961. He also served as the director of the Office of Science and Technology in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. Another high-level Jewish appointment was that of Sheldon Cohen as commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in 1965. By the end of the Johnson administration, the presence of Jews in high positions in the executive branch was hardly noticed. While one Jewish assistant continued to hold the “Jewish portfolio,” others played leadership and advisory roles on the entire spectrum of issues that defines American politics.

Nixon and the Jews: A Study in Paradoxes The relationship between President Richard Nixon’s personal view of Jews, on the one hand, and his appointment of several Jews to important positions in his administration, on the other, remains paradoxical. The more than four hundred hours of Nixon White House tapes, made public in the summer of 1999, reveal a level of antisemitic prejudice unique among American presidents. And yet, despite Nixon’s uncomplimentary comments about Jews, his personal dealings with individual Jews were highly cordial, and he reached out to several Jewish appointees to serve in his administration. His most influential Jewish assistant was Henry Kissinger. Kissinger, the foreign policy adviser on whom Richard Nixon relied more than any other, was appointed President Nixon’s special assistant for national security affairs in January 1969. Kissinger’s achievements in that role were many. In July 1971, he

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became the first American government official to visit China since 1949 and was instrumental in establishing diplomatic ties between the United States and the People’s Republic, paving the way for President Nixon’s historic visit to China the following February. Kissinger also had a principal role in negotiating the SALT I Agreement with the Soviet Union in May 1972. One of Kissinger’s most notable achievements while serving President Nixon was negotiating a ceasefire with the North Vietnamese in January 1973, for which Kissinger received the Nobel Peace Prize. In August 1973, Kissinger replaced William P. Rogers as secretary of state, becoming the first Jew to serve in that cabinet position. While secretary of state, he retained the title of special assistant to the president for national security affairs, the only secretary of state to do so. No Jew did as much to shape and determine US foreign policy as Kissinger, who was unquestionably the most powerful and influential Jewish cabinet member or White House adviser in American history. But Kissinger was far from the only Jew to serve in a prominent role under Nixon. Arthur Burns, a respected Columbia University economics professor who had served as President Eisenhower’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, was appointed chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; Walter Annenberg was named ambassador to England, the first Jew to be appointed to that most prestigious diplomatic post. Jews were among his closest White House advisers. Herbert Stein chaired Nixon’s Council of Economic Advisors; William Safire served as one of the president’s most trusted speechwriters. One of the most highly visible aides was Leonard Garment, Nixon’s former law partner and a registered Democrat, who had joined the White House staff when Nixon was elected president and who advised him on the selection of his cabinet. When the Watergate scandal was at its apex, Garment was appointed to replace John Dean as special counsel to President Nixon. It was Garment who advised Nixon to fire H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman, the president’s close White House assistants who were implicated in the Watergate cover-up.

A New Normality: Jews Continue in Important Roles Assuming the presidency following Nixon’s resignation, Gerald Ford retained Henry Kissinger as secretary of state. He quickly chose Alan Greenspan as chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers. Ford’s first new cabinet appointment was that of Edward H. Levi, an eminent legal scholar and university administrator, as attorney general. When Levi was sworn in on February 7, 1975, he

2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews

became the first American Jew to serve as attorney general. The descendant of one of America’s most distinguished rabbinic families, Levi was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of rabbis. Hailed by the American Bar Association as a “brilliant nomination,” Levi’s appointment was the first cabinet-level change of the Ford presidency. Unlike most of his predecessors at Justice, Levi’s was a nonpolitical appointment. With his reputation for integrity and nonpartisanship and his impeccable legal credentials, Levi restored public confidence and professionalism in the Justice Department, which had been shaken by the Watergate scandals and the personal involvement of Attorneys General John Mitchell and Richard Kleindienst. During his administration, President Jimmy Carter appointed four Jews to cabinet positions, more than had been appointed by any president until that time: Harold Brown at Defense, W. Michael Blumenthal at the Treasury, Philip Klutznick at Commerce, and Neil Goldschmidt at Transportation. During the 1976 presidential campaign and again in the period between his election and the inauguration, Carter promised a cabinet of new faces, rather than “old Washington hands” who had served in the government in earlier administrations. And yet, as Anthony J. Bennett has pointed out, Carter’s choice of cabinet appointees “contained many who had seen service in the Kennedy-Johnson years and the ‘crop of new faces’ description never quite seemed to fit. . . .” This was especially true of his Jewish appointees, three of whom had substantial prior experience in the federal government, having served under previous Democratic administrations. Harold Brown, a prominent physicist, educator, and government official, had served as a member of the President’s Science Advisory Committee during the Kennedy administration and, from 1965 to 1969, as secretary of the Air Force under President Johnson. Blumenthal was deputy assistant secretary of state for economic affairs at the start of the Kennedy administration. From 1963 to 1967, he served as ambassador and chairman of the US delegation to the Kennedy Round of Tariff Negotiations. Klutznick, an influential lawyer, businessman, and Democratic Party fundraiser, who had served as a federal housing commissioner under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, was Adlai Stevenson’s chief deputy at the United Nations and ambassador to the United Nations’ Economic and Social Council during the Kennedy administration. Of Carter’s four Jewish appointees, only Goldschmidt, the youthful mayor of Portland, Oregon, could be considered part of Carter’s “crop of new faces,” with no previous “inside the beltway” government experience. Furthermore, in appointing Goldschmidt in July 1979, as Nelson W. Polsby has noted, Carter

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was building on relationships established by the White House office of liaison with states and municipalities to reach out to the Democratic Party’s traditional urban voting constituencies that the Carter White House had ignored during the first two years of his administration. In appointing Klutznick as the 1980 presidential elections were rapidly approaching, Carter was reaching out to another traditional Democratic Party constituency that he had heretofore ignored: America’s Jewish voters. Carter’s November 1979 appointment of Klutznick, one of the preeminent Jewish communal leaders and philanthropists of his generation, was widely acclaimed throughout the American Jewish community. Not since Theodore Roosevelt’s appointment of Oscar Straus in 1906 had a Jewish cabinet appointee been able to boast such impressive credentials as a recognized and representative leader of American Jewry. A growing number of Jewish Democrats, who had voted for Carter in 1976, were reassessing their support for the Carter ticket because of their dissatisfaction with the Carter administration’s policies toward Israel. With the 1980 presidential election less than a year away, some political observers were already predicting that fewer Jewish voters would vote for the Democratic presidential candidate than in any election in recent memory; some said that President Carter might well receive less than fifty percent of the Jewish vote. The Carter White House, looking toward the campaign ahead, hoped that Klutznick in the cabinet, and thus part of the official presidential team, would reassure those Jewish Democratic voters who were wavering in their support for the president’s reelection. In addition to the four cabinet appointments and multiple subcabinet appointments, Carter also appointed Jews to important positions within the White House. Stuart E. Eizenstat served as a highly respected and especially influential member of the White House staff. A prominent young Atlanta attorney and Democratic Party activist, Eizenstat had been an early supporter of Jimmy Carter’s presidential candidacy. In 1976, he joined the Carter campaign on a full-time basis and after the election was appointed President Carter’s special assistant for domestic affairs and policy. In addition to his primary responsibilities as domestic policy chief, Eizenstat also held the “Jewish portfolio,” serving as the administration’s liaison to the Jewish community. Eizenstat was deeply interested in Holocaust-related issues and played an influential role in the creation of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. The first religiously observant Jew to serve on the White House staff, Eizenstat kept a kosher home and left work early on Fridays to observe the Sabbath.

2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews

Two prominent Washington attorneys, Lloyd Cutler and Alfred Moses, also served in the White House staff as special counsel to the president during the Carter years; Cutler would return in that role during the Clinton administration. Although Presidents Ronald Reagan and George Bush did not nominate any Jews to their cabinets, the first American presidents since Harry Truman not to do so, both Reagan and Bush appointed several Jews to important policymaking subcabinet positions, especially in the State and Defense departments. President Reagan appointed Alan Greenspan, who had chaired the President’s Council of Economic Advisers during the Ford administration, to head the Federal Reserve Board, a position he continued to hold into the new century. In addition, several Jews did serve on the White House staff under these presidents. Among these was Marshall Breger, a law professor who became special assistant to the president and was the Reagan administration’s liaison to the Jewish community. Breger, who would later be appointed solicitor of the Labor Department during the first Bush administration, was the first Orthodox Jew to serve on the White House staff. Jay Lefkowitz was the highest-ranking Jewish member of the White House staff during the first Bush administration, serving as secretary for cabinet affairs. William Kristol, a political scientist who had served as chief of staff to secretary of education William Bennett during the Reagan administration, served as chief of staff for Vice President Dan Quayle.

The Clinton Administration During his eight years in the White House, Bill Clinton appointed more Jews to high-level positions than had any other president. Five Jews headed cabinet departments during Clinton’s eight years; six others held portfolios with cabinet rank. The positions were of importance and covered the breadth of government activity. Robert E. Rubin and Lawrence Summers each served as secretary of the treasury. Dan Glickman, formerly a nine-term Democratic congressman and a longtime member of the House Agriculture Committee, became secretary of agriculture, the first Jew ever to serve in that position. Robert Reich was secretary of labor, the third Jew in American history to head the Labor Department. Mickey Kantor became the third Jew to serve as secretary of commerce in a presidential cabinet; earlier he had served as special trade representative, with cabinet rank. In addition, Madeleine Albright, who was born a Jew but raised as a Roman Catholic, became secretary of state in 1997, after having served as United Nations ambassador (with cabinet rank) during the first Clinton administration.

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After some controversy, Richard C. Holbrooke assumed the cabinet-rank position of ambassador to the United Nations in October 1998. Charlene Barshefsky succeeded Kantor as special trade representative. Jacob Lew was named director of the cabinet level Office of Management and Budget, and Gene Sperling served as assistant to the president for economic policy, also with cabinet rank. More Jews also served in prominent White House staff positions in the Clinton administration than at any time since the New Deal. Samuel “Sandy” Berger, who had served as deputy director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff during the Carter administration, was appointed deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. Following Clinton’s reelection in 1996, Berger was elevated to special assistant to the president, thus becoming the third Jew to serve as the president’s chief national security policy adviser on the White House staff. Three Jewish attorneys—Bernard Nussbaum, Lloyd Cutler, and former congressman and Federal Circuit Court Judge Abner Mikva—served on the White House staff as special counsels to the president. Numerous other Jews, including Rahm Emanuel, Ira Magaziner, Dick Morris, Ann Lewis, Maria Echaveste, and Sidney Blumenthal, served in a variety of advisory capacities on the White House staff. The number of Jews appointed to subcabinet positions or to ambassadorships is equally impressive. In many respects, the 1990s were a historic—indeed, a golden—era for Jews in American politics and government. In that decade more Jews won election to the Congress and Senate than at any other time in American history. During the first four years of the 1950s, only one Jew was a member of the United States Senate; during the 1990s, eleven served at one time. For the first time in American history, a president, Bill Clinton, appointed two Jews to the United States Supreme Court. In the eight years of his presidency, Clinton appointed almost as many Jews to cabinet posts as had all of his predecessors combined. During the Clinton presidency, Jews received more ambassadorial appointments, including the first appointment as ambassador to Israel, than in any other administration in American history. In 1997, President Clinton also appointed the first religiously Orthodox Jew as an ambassador to an Arab country, Egypt. Soon after Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer arrived in Cairo, moreover, a kosher kitchen was installed for him at the Cairo embassy. And, in August 2000, Senator Joseph Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew who does not campaign on the Sabbath, became the first Jewish candidate for vice president. Each of these developments would have been unimaginable during the 1950s. Collectively, they suggest that during the 1990s, as never before Jews were politically at home in the United States.

2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews

Since the nineteenth century, American Jews have looked to the presidency and to individual presidents for political recognition and representation in the form of presidential appointments to cabinet and subcabinet positions, to the White House staff, and to diplomatic positions. And they have not been disappointed in their expectations of the White House. In the early years, the Jews who were appointed were friends and often financial supporters of their political benefactors. Often the positions to which they were appointed were those reserved for Jews. During the twentieth century, from President Theodore Roosevelt’s historic appointment of Oscar Straus as secretary of commerce and labor in 1906 to the extraordinary and unprecedented number of Jewish appointments made by President Bill Clinton during the 1990s, American Jews have received ever greater political recognition through presidential appointments, which have been one of the most important vehicles for Jewish representation and participation in American government and public life. Franklin D. Roosevelt named more Jews to appointive offices than any other president before him. The Jewish presence in the federal government grew enormously in the post-World War II era, and especially beginning with the Kennedy administration, as presidents appointed more and more Jews to cabinet and subcabinet positions and to positions on the upper echelons of the White House staff. Presidents Kennedy through Carter made no less than twelve Jewish cabinet appointments, while naming two Jewish assistants to the president for national security affairs, two Jewish chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers, three Jewish special counsels to the president and, for the first time, a Jewish ambassador to the Court of St. James. Although it has been hardly remarked on, a distinctive legacy of the Clinton presidency was the extraordinary number of Jewish appointees in important policymaking and advisory positions throughout the executive branch of the federal government. Indeed, through appointments to his White House staff, cabinet, and a variety of subcabinet and diplomatic posts, President Clinton brought more Jews into high-level positions in government than had any other president. Although President George W. Bush has not appointed as many Jews to high office, it is still through presidential appointments that American Jews have received an unprecedented degree of political recognition and influence in American government and public life that would have been unimagined in any earlier generation. And a full path has been navigated. As we enter the twenty-first century, Jews in government have been appointed because of their qualifications to whatever posts they are deemed qualified. They are not appointed to represent Jews;

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they are appointed as Americans who happen to be Jewish. The degree to which the Lieberman nomination was accepted by the American public, despite some concerns expressed shortly after his selection by Jewish leaders who feared an observant Jew would provide a convenient scapegoat, is ample testimony that Jews within the executive branch are now accepted according to their abilities without concern for the faith they profess or the background of their ancestors.

Jews in the George W. Bush Administration Between 2001 and 2021, American Jews continued to look to the presidency and to individual presidents for political recognition and representation in the form of presidential appointments to cabinet and subcabinet positions, to the White House staff, to diplomatic positions and to the Supreme Court. And they have not been disappointed in their expectations from the White House. During his eight years in the White House, President George W. Bush appointed two Jews to his cabinet, Michael Chertoff and Michael Mukasey. Chertoff, the son and grandson of rabbis, a graduate of Harvard Law School and a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., was appointed the second secretary of homeland security in 2005, and served in that position until the end of the Bush presidency. Prior to this appointment in the Bush Cabinet, Chertoff had served as a United States circuit judge of the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, having been appointed by President Bush in 2003. Mukasey, who had been appointed by President Reagan as a district judge on the US District Court for the Southern District of New York in 1987, was appointed US attorney general by President Bush in 2007, thus becoming the second Jewish attorney general in US history. During the Bush administration, the three top subcabinet members in the Defense Department, all serving under Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld— Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, and Dov Zakheim—were all Jewish. Wolfowitz, Feith, and Zakheim had all earlier served in the Reagan administration. Wolfowitz, who had served as the State Department’s director of policy planning, the State Department’s assistant secretary for East Asian and Pacific affairs, and as ambassador to Indonesia during the Reagan years, was serving as dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies when President Bush appointed him deputy secretary of defense in 2001. As deputy secretary of defense, Wolfowitz was an early advocate of the Iraq War, and was viewed by many as one of the architects of the war. In 2005, Wolfowitz was appointed president of the World Bank, a position that he held for the next two years.

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Douglas Feith, who had served as Richard Perle’s deputy in the Pentagon and as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council during the Reagan Administration, was appointed undersecretary of defense for policy, the third ranking civilian position in the Defense Department, by President Bush. Throughout the 1990s, he advised Republican members of Congress on a variety of national security issues, including the Gulf War, arms control, and the Oslo peace process, which he predicted would fail because of Yasser Arafat’s lack of statesmanship and of a commitment to peace. Feith, an attorney and Jewish communal leader, was serving as president of the Charles E. Smith Jewish Day School at the time of his appointment by President Bush. In the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Feith played an important role in developing US government strategy for the war on terrorism, advising Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld on policy issues relating to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other venues of the war. Like Wolfowitz, an early advocate of the Iraq War, Feith was criticized by many of the war’s opponents as having been one of the architects of the war. After leaving the Defense Department in 2005, Feith recounted his years as undersecretary for policy in his best-selling memoir, War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism. Feith was succeeded as undersecretary of defense for policy by former US ambassador to Finland and Turkey and former Defense Department official Eric S. Edelman, who served in that position until the end of the Bush administration in 2009. Dov Zakheim, who had served in various Department of Defense positions, including deputy undersecretary of defense for planning and resources in the Reagan administration, served as one of the eight foreign policy advisers to George W. Bush in the 2000 presidential campaign, as part of a group led by Condoleezza Rice known as the Vulcans. In 2001, Zakheim was appointed comptroller and chief financial officer of the Department of Defense by President Bush and served in that position until July 2004. In 2008, he was appointed by President Bush as a member of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Daniel Kurtzer, who had served as ambassador to Egypt in the Clinton administration, was appointed ambassador to Israel, the second American Jew to serve in this position. Tevi Troy held White House staff positions during both terms of the Bush presidency. Beginning in 2003, he served at the White House as deputy cabinet secretary and liaison to the Jewish community, where he advocated for more Republican outreach to the American Jewish community, and where he

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officially represented the Bush administration at an international conference on antisemitism held in Berlin in April 2004. Troy also worked in the Bush White House as deputy assistant to the president for domestic policy from 2005 to 2007. In August 2007, he was appointed deputy secretary in the Health and Human Service Department, effectively the number two subcabinet appointee in that department. Elliott Abrams, who had served as assistant secretary of state throughout the Reagan administration, was appointed assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser in the administration of President George W. Bush, where he supervised the development of US policy toward Israel and the Middle East. During Condoleezza Rice’s tenure as secretary of state, Abrams accompanied her as a primary adviser on several of her visits to the Middle East in the course of diplomatic and policy-making discussions relating to the Israel-Lebanon and Israel-Palestinian conflicts. Many political observers in the Jewish community were especially appreciative of Elliott Abrams’s appointment, viewing it as notable because of Abrams’s leadership role in the Jewish community—he had served as president of his synagogue and a member of the US Holocaust Memorial Council—and his well-deserved reputation as being a staunch friend and supporter of the State of Israel. Notable, also, was President Bush’s creation of the President’s Council on Bioethics and his appointment of Leon Kass, the distinguished University of Chicago scientist, philosopher, and bioethicist, as its chairman. A biblical scholar as well as a philosopher, Kass published a major study of the biblical book of Genesis, while serving as chairman of the President’s Council on Bioethics, a unique achievement for a Jewish presidential appointee.

Jews in the Obama Administration As noted earlier, during his eight years in the White House, President Bill Clinton had appointed more Jews to cabinet and subcabinet posts, to ambassadorial posts and to White House staff positions than had any other president. President Obama seems to have followed in his footsteps, appointing a number of Jews to important administration positions. Several of President Obama’s Jewish appointees, who served in important policymaking and advisory positions throughout the executive branch of the federal government, had earlier served in the Clinton administration. Rahm Emanuel, who had served as a senior advisor for policy and strategy on the White House staff during the Clinton years, and had subsequently

2. Presidents, Presidential Appointments, and Jews

served three terms in Congress as a US representative from Chicago, was named White House chief of staff, the first major appointment announced by President-elect Obama. One of President Obama’s closest political confidants and advisers, Emanuel became the second Jew in American history to serve as White House chief of staff. His appointment was especially welcomed in the Jewish community because of his strong personal identification with, and public support of, the State of Israel. His father, Benjamin Emanuel, a Chicago physician, had been born in Jerusalem, and Rahm Emanuel had attended summer camp in Israel and, in 1991, had served as a civilian volunteer with the Israeli Defense Forces during the first Gulf War. During the 2008 presidential campaign, many Jewish voters had doubts about candidate Obama’s pro-Israel views. President Obama’s appointment of Rahm Emanuel, a religiously observant Jew who had lived in Israel and was known to be a staunch friend and supporter of the Jewish state, was especially reassuring to many Jewish voters who had voiced concerns about Obama’s support of the political security and survival of the State of Israel. Also reassuring to these Jewish voters was the fact that David Axelrod, another close Obama political confidant with strong roots in the Chicago Jewish community and a solid track record of support for Israel, who had served as the chief strategist of Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, was appointed to a high-level position on the Obama White House staff, as a senior adviser to the President. Jewish Democrats were noticeably appreciative of President Obama’s several other high-level Jewish appointments as well. Lawrence Summers, who had served as secretary of the treasury in the Clinton administration, and who had subsequently served as the first Jewish president of Harvard University, was appointed director of the White House’s National Economic Council. Richard Holbrooke, one of America’s most experienced diplomats, who had earlier served as the Clinton administration’s ambassador to Germany, special envoy to Kosovo, and as ambassador to the United Nations, was appointed by President Obama as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Dennis Ross, another Jewish diplomat with extensive State Department experience, while serving as President Clinton’s special Middle East negotiator, with the rank of ambassador, had been instrumental in shaping US involvement in the Middle East peace process. In 2008, Ross had advised the Obama presidential campaign on Middle East policy and, after the election, was appointed as President Obama’s chief adviser on Iran. Of special significance to Jewish political observers was the fact that two of the three top positions in the new Obama State Department also went to Jews: James B. Steinberg, who had earlier served as deputy national security adviser to President Bill Clinton, was appointed by President Obama as

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deputy secretary of state for policy, serving as the principal deputy to Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Jacob Lew, an Orthodox Jew who had previously served as the director of the US Office of Management and the Budget in the Clinton administration, was appointed deputy secretary of state for management and resources, the chief operating officer of the new Obama State Department. Later in the Obama Presidency, Jacob Lew would be appointed secretary of the treasury, the fifth Jew to serve as Treasury secretary in US history. Dan Shapiro, who began his work in the Obama administration as senior director for the Middle East and North Africa on the National Security Council, was appointed ambassador to Israel in 2011. Another of President Obama’s prominent Jewish appointees was Elena Kagan, who had served as associate White House counsel and as deputy director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council during the Clinton administration, and more recently (beginning in 2003) as the first woman dean of Harvard Law School. In 2009, Elena Kagan was appointed solicitor general, the first Jewish woman and the third American Jew to serve in that position. She was also reportedly on the short list of nominees for the Supreme Court vacancy to which President Obama appointed Judge Sonia Sotomayor in 2009. In 2010, Kagan was appointed to the Supreme Court, the eighth Jew and the second Jewish woman to be appointed to the Court.

Jews in the Trump Administration President Trump appointed two Jewish cabinet members, Steven Mnuchin, who became secretary of the treasury, the sixth Jew to hold this cabinet position, and David Shulkin, who was appointed secretary of veterans’ affairs. There were a few Jewish advisers on the White House staff, most notably Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. Kushner was undoubtedly Trump’s most influential Jewish adviser, helping to shape White House policy in various arenas, including the opioid crisis, the construction of Trump’s border wall, and managing the medical stockpile for the COVID crisis. But Kushner’s major achievement is likely to be viewed as having negotiated the peace agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, a historic agreement that led several other nations, including Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan, to sign peace agreements with Israel. After Jared Kushner, President Trump’s most influential White House adviser was Stephen Miller who served as senior adviser for policy and director of speechwriting for the Trump White House. Miller was regarded as the chief architect of the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies and, as a speechwriter for Trump, helped write

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the President’s inaugural address and State of the Union addresses. Gary Cohn, the former president of Goldman Sachs, served for two years as the president’s chief economic advisor. Donald Trump was the fourth president in a row, since Bill Clinton, to appoint a Jewish ambassador to Israel, David Friedman. Friedman also advised the Trump White House on US-Israel relations, and played an instrumental role in the Trump administration’s decision to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv.

The Biden Administration and the Jews In the first few weeks of the Biden administration, President Biden appointed almost as many Jews to cabinet, cabinet level, and top subcabinet positions as had Bill Clinton during the eight years of his presidency. Anthony Blinken, who had served as a deputy secretary of state and deputy national security adviser in the Obama administration, was appointed secretary of state, the second Jew after Henry Kissinger to hold this post; Janet Yellin, who had served as chairperson of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers under President Clinton, and as chairperson of the Federal Reserve Board in the Obama Administration, was appointed secretary of the treasury by Joe Biden, thus becoming the seventh Jewish (and first woman) secretary of the treasury in US history; Merrick Garland, a federal judge serving on the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, was appointed attorney general, the third Jew to serve in that important cabinet position; Ron Klain, who had served as chief of staff to both Vice President Al Gore and to Vice President Biden, was appointed White House chief of staff, the third Jew to serve in that position; Alejandro Mayorkas, who was the deputy secretary of homeland security under President Obama, became the second Jew to serve as secretary of homeland security; Avril Danica Haines, the first Jew (and the first woman) to serve as director of national intelligence; Wendy Sherman, who was an assistant secretary of state in the Clinton administration, and was deputy secretary of state for political affairs under President Obama, was appointed deputy secretary of state, the number two position in the State Department, by President Biden; Rachel Levine, the state of Pennsylvania’s secretary of health, who was appointed deputy secretary of health and human services, is the first known transgender person to be nominated for a position that requires Senate confirmation; and David Cohen, an expert on Iran who has long been involved in Jewish causes and issues, has been appointed deputy director of the CIA, the same position he held under President Obama.

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The Appointment of Louis D. Brandeis, First Jewish Justice on the Supreme Court* The sudden death of Justice Joseph R. Lamar of Georgia on January 2, 19161 created an unexpected vacancy on the Supreme Court for President Woodrow Wilson to fill. Over the next twenty-six days, Washington, DC was abuzz with rumors about whom President Wilson would appoint to succeed Lamar on the Court. Although Louisiana’s Jewish senator Judah P. Benjamin had been offered a nomination to the Supreme Court by President Milliard Fillmore in 1853, he had turned it down to remain in the Senate, and no Jew since had ever received a presidential appointment to the Supreme Court. When President Wilson announced the nomination of Louis D. Brandeis on January 28, 1916, he precipitated a four-month Senate confirmation battle, the most contentious fight over the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice in American history until the 1987 Senate battle over the confirmation of Robert Bork. Brandeis, the nationally known “people’s attorney” from Boston and one of the country’s most celebrated progressive reformers, had been one of Woodrow Wilson’s most influential advisers and political confidants since Wilson’s campaign for the presidency in 1912. After Wilson’s election, Brandeis played a major role in helping to shape the president’s “New Freedom” economic policies and programs. Wilson had initially hoped to appoint Brandeis to his Cabinet. *

1

“The Appointment of Louis D. Brandeis, First Jewish Justice of the Supreme Court” was originally written for, and published in, Louis D. Brandeis 100: Then and Now. Reprinted by permission of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life, Brandeis University. David N. Atkinson, Leaving the Bench: Supreme Court Justices at the End (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1999), 88.

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Much to his disappointment, antisemitic opposition, organized and financed by leaders of Boston’s banking and legal establishment, had prevented Wilson from appointing Brandeis as the country’s first Jewish attorney general in 1913. Wilson, however, remained determined to appoint Brandeis to his Cabinet or to the Supreme Court, and the unexpected resignation of Justice Lamar created the Court vacancy that Wilson had been waiting for. The Brandeis appointment came as a surprise to many politicians and pundits alike. Very few people outside of Wilson’s small circle of trusted White House advisers would have anticipated that the president, facing what would be a tough reelection fight only eight months later, would make such a controversial political appointment. At least one important member of Wilson’s inner circle, Colonel Edward House, was apparently not consulted beforehand about the Brandeis nomination. When he later heard of the nomination, House was reportedly “appalled.”1 Brandeis had learned about the possible appointment a few days earlier, but said nothing about it until the White House announcement was made. “I am not exactly sure,” he wrote to his brother Alfred in Louisville, “that I am to be congratulated, but I am glad the President wanted to make the appointment and I am convinced, all things considered, that I should accept.”2 Secretary of the Treasury William Gibbs McAdoo, a Brandeis friend and political ally, and President Wilson’s son-in-law, was one of two Wilson Cabinet members who first urged Wilson to nominate Brandeis to the Supreme Court. His advice was perhaps not surprising, as it had been Brandeis who had earlier urged Wilson to appoint McAdoo secretary of the treasury. Wilson’s attorney general, Thomas V. Gregory, also enthusiastically recommended Brandeis, although Gregory, while praising Brandeis as “the greatest lawyer in the United States,” warned Wilson that Brandeis’s nomination would result in a “tempest.”3 Gregory’s warning, if anything, was understated. President Wilson’s unexpected announcement, as the White House had thought, stirred up a torrent of opposition. Appointment of a justice to the Supreme Court is a lifetime appointment, or until the appointee retires. It is an opportunity for a liberal 1 2

3

Thomas Karfunkel and Thomas W. Ryley, The Jewish Seat: Anti-Semitism and the Appointment of Jews to the Supreme Court (Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1978), 40. Louis D. Brandeis, letter to Alfred Brandeis, January 28, 1916, in Letters of Louis D. Brandeis, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1975), 4:25 [hereinafter LDB Letters]. Philippa Strum, Louis D. Brandeis: Justice for the People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 291.

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president, such as Wilson, to impose his liberal judicial philosophy on his political adversaries for a much longer period than he actually serves in the White House. While this upset Wilson’s conservative opponents, Brandeis’s long record as a people’s attorney committed to progressive reform upset them even more. Only fifty-nine years old at the time of his appointment, Brandeis, his critics feared, might very well enjoy a tenure of more than twenty years on the Court, as indeed he did. Conservatives reacted with shock and anger to the president’s bombshell announcement. The New York Sun denounced the appointment of such a radical to “the stronghold of sane conservatism, the safeguard of our institutions, the ultimate interpreter of our fundamental law.”4 Former president William Howard Taft, who had hoped against hope that Wilson would transcend partisan politics and appoint him to the Court, was livid when he heard the news of Brandeis’s nomination. He wrote: It is one of the deepest wounds that I have had as an American and as a lover of the Constitution and a believer in progressive conservatism, that such as man as Brandeis could be put on the Court, as I believe he is likely to be. He is a muckraker, an emotionalist for his own purposes, a socialist, prompted by jealousy, a hypocrite . . . who is utterly unscrupulous . . . a man of infinite cunning . . . of great tenacity of purpose, and, in my judgment, of much power for evil.5

Even the New York Times was unhappy with the appointment, lamenting that Brandeis “is essentially a contender, a striver after change and reforms. The Supreme Court by its very nature is the conservator of our institutions.”6 On Wednesday, February 9, 1916, according to procedure, a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Senator William Chilton of West Virginia, met to begin discussion of the nomination of Brandeis to the Supreme Court. Over the next three months, the five members of the Senate subcommittee heard testimony, discussed petitions and other correspondence, and evaluated the criticism and support for Brandeis’s nomination, before issuing a report to the full Senate Judiciary Committee. The full Judiciary Committee would 4 5 6

Quoted in Melvin I. Urofsky, ed., Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1981), 106. William Howard Taft, letter to Gus Karger, January 31, 1916, as cited in Arthur S. Link, Wilson, vol. 4 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1964), 325. Quoted in Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition, 106.

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then make a recommendation to the Senate, which is empowered by the Constitution to advise and consent on all Supreme Court nominations. A majority of the US Senate would then have to vote in favor of his nomination before he could be confirmed. Day after day, for the next four months, there was standing room only in the Senate chamber, which was crowded with senators and witnesses, pundits and reporters, and friends and opponents of Brandeis. Never present, however, was the nominee himself. Senate tradition dictated then—and that tradition would continue until Felix Frankfurter’s Supreme Court nomination twentythree years later—that Supreme Court nominees were not permitted to appear at their confirmation hearings.7 Thus, Brandeis, under the Senate rules of that time, could not speak in his own defense. In his absence, Edward McClennen, a junior partner in Brandeis’s law firm in Boston, moved to Washington for the next several months to lead and coordinate the campaign for Senate confirmation of his colleague’s nomination. While much of the opposition to Brandeis’s nomination was directed at Brandeis’s reputation as a radical social reformer and vocal opponent of big business and the “money trusts,” there is little question that some of the campaign against the Brandeis nomination was antisemitic in origin.8 Antisemitism was certainly a factor in the opposition of A. Lawrence Lowell, Harvard University’s virulently antisemitic president. Immediately after the 1912 election, Lowell, an early supporter of the Immigration Restriction League and one of its national vice presidents, had publicly opposed Brandeis’s appointment to Wilson’s cabinet, notifying the president that Brandeis did not “stand very high in the opinion of the best judges in Massachusetts.”9 When Brandeis’s Supreme Court nomination was announced, Lowell wrote to his good friend, Massachusetts’s Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge: Are we to put on our Supreme Bench a man whose reputation for integrity is not unimpeachable? It is difficult—perhaps impossible—to get direct evidence of any act by Brandeis that is, strictly speaking, dishonest; and yet a man who is believed by all the better part of the bar to be unscrupulous ought not to be a member of the highest court of the 7 8 9

Leonard Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter: A Dual Biography (New York: Harper and Row, 1984), 104. Remy J. Abraham, Justices, Presidents and Senators: A History of the US Supreme Court Appointments from Washington to Clinton (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), 136. Allon Gal, Brandeis of Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 196.

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nation. Is there anything that can be done to make his confirmation less probable?10

Lowell subsequently gathered a petition of protest against Brandeis that had fifty-five signatures, including, most notably, that of the Boston patrician lawyer Charles Francis Adams, Jr., treasurer of the Harvard Corporation, former president of the Union Pacific Railroad, and descendant of two American Presidents, who shared his brother Henry’s antisemitic bias. Besides Adams, the Lowell petition included the names of many of the most eminent Brahmin leaders of Boston’s business and legal establishment, such as Sargent, Gardner, Peabody, Shattuck, and Coolidge. Lowell sent his signed petition to his good friend, Massachusetts Republican Senator Henry Cabot Lodge who, on Lincoln’s birthday, inserted a copy into the Congressional Record, before presenting a copy of the document to the Senate subcommittee’s chairman, Senator Chilton.11 Lowell, whose antisemitism was well known, later became notorious for trying to place a quota limiting Jewish admissions to Harvard. To Lowell’s evident chagrin, the Harvard Law School faculty, with one exception, publicly endorsed Brandeis’s nomination. Brandeis’s friend and close political ally Felix Frankfurter, who with Brandeis’s glowing recommendation to Dean Roscoe Pound had been appointed to the Harvard Law School faculty the previous year, mobilized nine of his other ten faculty colleagues at the Law School to support the Brandeis nomination. Throughout the four-month-long confirmation battle, Frankfurter wrote a score of magazine editorials, letters, and articles in support of his friend. On February 5, The New Republic published an editorial, unsigned but written by Frankfurter, reviewing Brandeis’s accomplishments, praising him for his judicial qualities and for seeking “to make the great reconciliation between order and justice.” At Frankfurter’s suggestion, Roscoe Pound wrote to Senator Chilton praising the Brandeis appointment. So did Harvard University’s revered former President, Charles W. Eliot, who wrote to Chilton that “I have known Mr. Louis D. Brandeis for forty years and I believe that I understand his capacities and character.” Recalling Brandeis as a “distinguished student” at Harvard and referring to his “practical altruism and public spirit,” Eliot concluded his letter by saying “that the rejection by the Senate of his nomination to the Supreme Court would be a grave misfortune for the whole legal community, the Court, 10 Alden L. Todd, Justice on Trial: The Case of Louis D. Brandeis (New York: McGraw­Hill, 1964), 92. 11 Ibid., 106.

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all American business and the country.”12 “Next to a letter from God,” Brandeis’s law partner Edward McLennen cheerfully declared of Eliot’s letter, “we have got the best.”13 Numerous other letters in support of Brandeis’s candidacy were sent to the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee as well. Among those writing to the subcommittee, or testifying on his behalf, were Newton Baker, the reform mayor of Cleveland, president of the National Consumers League, and Wilson’s future secretary of war; Frances Perkins, who would later be Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor; Henry Morgenthau, Sr., who had just returned home to America after serving three years as Wilson’s ambassador to Turkey; Walter Lippmann, the editor of The New Republic; Harper’s Weekly editor Norman Hapgood, who would later serve briefly as Wilson’s ambassador to Denmark; and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise. As anticipated, liberal politicians from across the political spectrum voiced support for Brandeis. Social Reformers in the Democratic Party and Progressive Republicans alike applauded Wilson’s appointment, hailing the Brandeis nomination as an historic moment for America. Within days of Justice Lamar’s death, Attorney General Gregory had met with Senator Robert La Follette of Wisconsin, who was the only senator consulted about the Brandeis nomination prior to the White House’s January 28 announcement. At Wilson’s behest, he asked La Follette “whether Progressive Republicans in the Senate could be counted on to cross party line and vote to confirm Brandeis. La Follette enthusiastically said yes.”14 Also, as anticipated, many Southern Democrats vocally opposed Brandeis’s nomination. Brandeis’s law partner Edward McClennen “later placed anti-Semitism on the top of the list of the reasons for the opposition to Brandeis . . . among Southern Democrats.”15 Since the Supreme Court vacancy for which Brandeis was being nominated had been created by the death of Justice Lamar of Georgia, Southern Democrats in the Senate expected that Wilson would appoint a Southerner to fill Lamar’s seat. They were disappointed, and some angered, when Wilson did not. Also, as Colonel House reportedly told Henry

12 Alpheus Thomas Mason, Brandeis: A Free Man’s Life (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), 501. 13 Ibid. 14 Strum, Louis D. Brandeis, 291. 15 Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter, 102.

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Morgenthau, Sr., some Southern senators feared that, if confirmed, Brandeis would try to undo the separate but equal doctrine.16 Throughout the long Senate confirmation battle, the anti-Brandeis campaign was largely organized and financed by Henry Lee Higginson, the wealthy head of the most powerful banking house in Boston, a pillar of the Boston Brahmin establishment, and for many years Brandeis’s most bitter political foe. He had earlier helped organize and finance the antisemitic campaign that had helped to derail Brandeis’s appointment to Wilson’s Cabinet. Shocked by the news of the Brandeis nomination, Higginson wrote his close friend Senator Lodge, warning him that Brandeis “has not the judicial quality. It would be well to investigate sundry questions about him.”17 Some opponents of the Brandeis nomination were more explicitly antisemitic. George Wickersham, a former US attorney general during the Taft administration and the president of the New York Bar Association at the time of the Senate confirmation battle, attacked Brandeis’s supporters as “a bunch of Hebrew uplifters.”18 William F. Fitzgerald, a conservative Boston Democrat and longtime political foe of Brandeis, wrote that “the fact that a slimy fellow of this kind by his smoothness and intrigue, together with his Jewish instinct can be appointed to the Court should teach an object lesson” to true Americans.19 At the same time, within days of Wilson’s surprise announcement, William Howard Taft began mobilizing opposition to Brandeis among the leadership of the American Bar Association. Taft and six other former American Bar Association presidents, including Elihu Root, the former secretary of war and secretary of state, sent a scathing letter of protest to the Senate Judiciary Committee stating that “the undersigned feel under the painful duty to say to you that in their opinion, taking into view the reputation, character and professional career of Mr. Louis D. Brandeis, he is not a fit person to be a member of the Supreme Court of the United States.” Taft, it should be noted, did not share the antisemitic bigotry of A. Lawrence Lowell and other vocal opponents of the Brandeis nomination. Taft, who enjoyed close ties to the Jewish community of his native Cincinnati, had appointed Julian Mack as the first Jew to serve as a Federal judge on the US District Court 16 Strum, Louis D. Brandeis, 297–298. 17 Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter, 105. 18 Alan M. Dershowitz, Abraham, the World’s First (But Certainly Not Last) Jewish Lawyer (New York: Schocken, 2015), 91; and Todd, Justice on Trial, 216–217. 19 Melvin I. Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis: A Life (New York: Random House, 2009), 440 and 828.

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of Appeals, and counted Jewish leaders such as Mayer Sulzberger and Julius Rosenwald among his political confidants and friends. He was personally distressed by the anti-Jewish comments of George Wickersham directed at the “Hebrew uplifters,” especially Walter Lippmann and Felix Frankfurter, campaigning in support of Brandeis.20 And, as is well known, while serving as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court from 1921 to 1930, Taft eventually developed a genuine affection and respect for Brandeis, despite their longstanding (and continuing) differences on issues of law and politics. Taft reportedly was “won over by the luminous mind and great learning of Justice Brandeis.”21 In 1923, after two sessions of the Court during which Taft and Brandeis had worked together as colleagues, Taft wrote his daughter Helen about his old rival: “I have come to like Brandeis very much indeed. . . . he is a very hard worker. He thinks much of the Court and is anxious to have it consistent and strong, and he pulls his weight in the boat.”22 In 1912, however, Taft had not yet had the opportunity to develop these more charitable views about Brandeis. More than the opposition of Taft, the equally strong opposition of Massachusetts senior Senator Henry Cabot Lodge’s was of particular concern to Brandeis’s supporters. By longstanding tradition, according to what was known as the rule of Senatorial courtesy, before a president announces the name of a Supreme Court nominee, and sends the Supreme Court nomination to the Senate for confirmation, he must first get the approval of the two senators from the nominee’s state. At the very least, congressional custom mandates, he must notify the senators of his intention. In the case of his nomination of Brandeis, Wilson did neither. Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, the state’s senior senator and a conservative Republican, had close ties to the Boston Brahmin establishment opposing Brandeis’s nomination. As commentators noted at the time, Wilson was not so much defying him, as ignoring him. Lodge’s position of influence, as the senior senator from the nominee’s state, would probably have brought about Brandeis’s defeat had Lodge invoked the rule of Senatorial courtesy. But, to the surprise of many of his Senate colleagues, Lodge, despite his open disdain for both Brandeis and Wilson, did not choose to do so.

20 Todd, Justice on Trial, 216–217. 21 Henry Pringle, William Howard Taft: The Life and Times, vol. 2 (Newtown, CT: American Political Biography Press, by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, Inc., 1967), 970. 22 William Howard Taft, letter to Helen Taft Manning, June 11, 1923, as quoted in Pringle, William Howard Taft, 97.

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Indeed, although Henry Cabot Lodge did urge the American Bar Association leadership to oppose the Brandeis nomination, and did bring A. Lawrence Lowell’s anti­Brandeis petition to the attention of his colleagues in the Senate, he did not take the major leadership role in mobilizing the political opposition against Brandeis as many had expected he would do. One writer’s explanation is that Lodge feared the political repercussions in the upcoming Senate election of November 1916, when he would have to face Massachusetts voters for the first time since the beginning of his Senate career in 1892. Since the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment to the Constitution three years earlier, which Lodge had strongly opposed, he would no longer be chosen by the state senate that had selected him four times previously; now, for the first time, he would have to campaign for the support of newly enfranchised voters, who would include many Catholics and Jews. He could not predict, or so the speculation goes, the political impact of what his leading the fight against Brandeis would have on his chances for reelection in November. Indeed, some of Lodge’s friends and advisers appreciated the acute dilemma that the Brandeis nomination had caused for the senior senator from Massachusetts. Arthur D. Hill, a Boston lawyer and close friend who managed Lodge’s personal legal affairs and investments, wrote to the senator at once urging him not to publicly oppose the nomination and risk defeat in the election later in the year.23 Hill’s advice was prescient: Lodge followed Hill’s counsel, and won a close, hotly contested reelection bid the following November. Lodge’s opponent in that Senate race, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, the flamboyant former mayor of Boston, applauded Wilson’s nomination of Brandeis, as did most of the Irish Democrats in the city. Years later, “Honey Fitz’s” grandson, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, would say that the Supreme Court justice he most admired, and sought to emulate in deciding on his own Supreme Court nominations, was Louis D. Brandeis. Woodrow Wilson did not consult Jewish leaders, such as Jacob Schiff, before naming Brandeis to the Court, as Theodore Roosevelt had consulted Schiff before appointing Oscar Straus to his cabinet in 1906. Nonetheless, Schiff and many other Jewish leaders, including some who had earlier been Brandeis’s critics, came together in support of his appointment during the four months of his Senate confirmation battle. Schiff praised the appointment both publicly and privately, predicting that Brandeis would become “an adornment” to the Court, and that his Senate confirmation would be “an honor to our people.”24 Henry 23 Todd, Justice on Trial, 83–85. 24 Urofsky, Brandeis: A Life, 458.

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Morgenthau, Sr. played an especially prominent role in orchestrating support for Brandeis throughout the Senate confirmation battle, conferring almost daily in strategy sessions in New York with Stephen S. Wise and Norman Hapgood, and serving as the Brandeis campaign’s liaison to Colonel House.25 Oscar Straus’s brother Nathan, a preeminent Jewish merchant prince and philanthropist, convinced the journalist Arthur Brisbane to write an editorial for the New York Evening Journal, in support of the Brandeis nomination. Straus subsequently wrote Brandeis a personal note encouraging him not to be distressed by the opposition, for “you will be most admired through the enemies you made.”26 Some Jewish leaders, however, were less vocal in their support. For Louis Marshall, as Jonathan D. Sarna has suggested, Wilson’s appointment of Brandeis was “particularly galling,” since during the Taft administration he had lobbied for a Supreme Court appointment for himself and had been bitterly disappointed when he was not selected. In a confidential handwritten note to Marshall, his close friend and associate Cyrus Adler expressed his personal views about the Brandeis nomination that Marshall presumably also shared: “I do not view the nomination of Mr. Brandeis with complacency; he may have sufficient legal learning, but he seems to me to be a partisan and agitator and not the type of fair character and dispassionate type of mind which should be possessed by members of the most distinguished tribunal in the world.”27 In public, however, Adler like Marshall remained silent. “I have kept silent for many months,” Adler wrote to Jacob Schiff: “because I did not want to be accused of endeavoring to injure his [Brandeis’s] confirmation to the Supreme Court.”28 It may well be, as William Howard Taft later claimed, that Jewish leaders like Marshall and Adler, “all ha[d] to praise the appointment and all hate[d] Wilson for making it.”29 On April 1, 1916, the Senate subcommittee voted 3–2 in favor of Brandeis’s confirmation. On May 24, 1916, after several weeks of further deliberation, 25 Strum, Louis D. Brandeis, 297–298. 26 Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter, 101. 27 Cyrus Adler to Louis Marshall, undated handwritten note, 1916, box 47, Louis Marshall Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH, quoted in Jonathan D. Sarna, “Two Jewish Lawyers Named Louis,” American Jewish History 94, nos. 1–2 (March–June 2008): 16. 28 Cyrus Adler, letter to Jacob Schiff, June 15, 1916, in Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters, vol. 1, ed. Ira Robinson (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985), 308, as quoted in Sarna, “Two Jewish Lawyers Named Louis,” 17. 29 William Howard Taft, letter to Henry W. Taft, as quoted in Todd, Justice on Trial, 80, and in Sarna, “Two Jewish Lawyers Named Louis,” 17.

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during which Senate Republicans still tried unsuccessfully to defeat the nomination, the Senate Judiciary Committee as a whole, by a strict party 10–8 vote, recommended that Brandeis be confirmed. The full Senate followed its recommendation and, on June 1, 1916, Wilson’s Vice President Thomas Riley Marshall, in his role as president of the Senate, announced that Louis D. Brandeis had been confirmed as an associate justice of the Supreme Court by a 47–22 vote. While the Senate was still in session that afternoon, Brandeis had taken the train from his Boston office to his summer home in Dedham. When he arrived home, his wife Alice happily conveyed the good news, greeting him with “Good evening, Mr. Justice Brandeis.” After finally winning his bitter Senate confirmation battle, Brandeis went on to become one of the most important and influential justices ever to sit on the United States Supreme Court. Legal scholars and historians have consistently confirmed Brandeis’s enduring reputation as one of our “greatest” Supreme Court justices. In each of the several polls ranking or rating Supreme Court justices in terms of judicial “greatness,” conducted over four decades, Brandeis has invariably been ranked, following John Marshall and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., as one of the three greatest justices in American history. During his twentythree years on the Court, Brandeis played a singular role in developing the modern jurisprudence of free speech and the doctrine of a constitutionally protected right of privacy. As Alan Dershowitz has aptly noted, “The First Amendment’s right of free expression, the Fourth Amendment’s right to privacy and the due process clause’s focus on personal liberty (rather than property) all owe their current vitality to the creative genius of Justice Brandeis, whose dissenting opinions have become the law of the land.”30 Much of Brandeis’s enduring legacy derives, of course, from his having been the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court and, unquestionably, one of the greatest justices in the Court’s history. Brandeis’s appointment in 1916 set a precedent for more Jewish appointments and greater religious diversity on the Supreme Court. When on January 15, 1932, Justice Holmes retired from the Court at the age of ninety, President Hoover nominated Benjamin N. Cardozo, the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, to succeed him. In appointing Cardozo, Herbert Hoover became the second president to appoint a Jew to the Supreme Court. During the next six years, for the first time in American history, two Jews served together on the Supreme Court. 30 Alan M. Dershowitz, “The Practice,” Sunday New York Times Book Review, September 27, 2009.

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With Brandeis’s appointment in 1916 began the tradition of a single position on the Supreme Court occupied by Jews, informally designated “Jewish Seat.” There was no single “Jewish Seat” between 1932 and 1938, when two Jews served on the Court simultaneously. Both Cardozo’s appointment and his untimely death occurred during Brandeis’s long tenure. There had been speculation that President Franklin D. Roosevelt intended to appoint his trusted adviser Harvard Law School Professor Felix Frankfurter to succeed Justice Brandeis upon Brandeis’s retirement.31 However, when Justice Cardozo died suddenly in 1938, FDR appointed Frankfurter to fill Cardozo’s seat, which came to be known as the Court’s “Jewish Seat,” that would later be occupied by Justices Arthur Goldberg and Abe Fortas. The emergence of a single position, informally designated as the “Jewish seat,” occupied by Justices Cardozo, Frankfurter, Goldberg, and Fortas in direct succession, thus came about after FDR’s appointment of Felix Frankfurter to replace Cardozo. Although Brandeis still remained on the Court after Frankfurter’s appointment in January 1939, he resigned three weeks later. Upon Frankfurter’s retirement from the Court in 1962, President Kennedy appointed his secretary of labor, Arthur Goldberg, to the Court’s Jewish seat. When Goldberg unexpectedly resigned from the Court in 1965 to accept Lyndon Johnson’s appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, LBJ appointed his close friend and adviser Abe Fortas to replace him. Only with Abe Fortas’s resignation in 1969, and President Richard Nixon’s appointment of Harry Blackmun, a Protestant, to the seat vacated by Fortas, would the fifty-three-year tradition of a “Jewish seat” on the Court come to an end. It would not be until twenty-four years later that another Jew, and the first Jewish woman, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, would join the Court. The following year, 1994, President Bill Clinton would appointment a second Jew, Stephen G. Breyer, to succeed Harry Blackmun. When Elena Kagan was appointed by President Barack Obama in 2009, she became the eighth Jewish justice, and second Jewish woman, to serve on the Supreme Court. ( Justice Kagan sits on the seat that Justice Brandeis once held.) Throughout his twenty-three-year tenure as a justice of the Supreme Court, and at the time of his death in 1941, Louis D. Brandeis was among the bestknown and highly respected Jews in the United States. During the 1930s, only Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, and the great Jewish baseball superstar Hank 31 Sheldon Goldman, “The Politics of Appointing Catholics to the Federal Court,” University of St. Thomas Law Journal 4, no. 2 (2006): 19; and Abraham, Justices, Presidents and Senators, 166.

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Greenberg may have eclipsed Brandeis in terms of fame and celebrity. Franklin D. Roosevelt famously called him Isaiah, as did members of FDR’s inner circle during the New Deal. Some Christian admirers went so far as to praise him as “the Greatest Jew in the World since Jesus Christ.”32 To this day, Brandeis remains the only American Jew after whom a great university has been named. Part of his enduring Jewish legacy is attributable to his leadership of the American Zionist movement, both prior to and following his appointment as the first Jewish Justice of the Supreme Court. This distinction as the first Jewish justice is in some ways ironic, because Brandeis’s upbringing was the least Jewish of any of the eight Jewish justices of the Supreme Court. His parents, well-educated German speaking Jews from Prague, did not observe any Jewish holidays. His mother Frederika, especially, “was averse to religious enthusiasm of any sort and raised her children to cherish the ethical teachings of all religions and the rituals of none.”33 Brandeis celebrated Christmas every year with his parents and continued to do so when raising his own family. He did not live near or socialize with other Jews, did not belong to a synagogue, and until he discovered the Zionist movement, he contributed little to Jewish charities—indeed until then he had nothing to do with organized Jewish life. Nor did Brandeis observe any part of the Jewish dietary laws. Much later in life, even after he had become a leader of the Zionist movement, he was still delighted to receive the hams that his brother Alfred occasionally sent him from Louisville. “There is great rejoicing over the ham—which has just arrived,” he wrote, thanking his brother.34 Although for the first half-century of his life Brandeis was a highly assimilated Jew who cared little about the religious observance of Judaism, by 1914 he had assumed the leadership of the American Zionist movement. His mid-life “conversion” to Zionism, as it has often been known, and his meteoric emergence as the preeminent Zionist leader in America, comprise an important chapter in Brandeis’s life, which I shall discuss in more detail in my forthcoming

32 Jonathan D. Sarna, “‘The Greatest Jew in the World since Jesus Christ’: The Jewish Legacy of Louis D. Brandeis,” American Jewish History 81, nos. 3–4 (Spring–Summer 1994): 346. 33 Melvin l. Urofsky, “Justice Louis Brandeis,” in The Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court Revisited: Brandeis to Fortas, ed. Jennifer M. Lowe (Washington, DC: The Supreme Court Historical Society, 1994), 12–13. 34 Louis D. Brandeis, letters to Alfred Brandeis, October 7, 1917 and March 19, 1921, in LDB Letters, vol. 4, 313 and 543; and Sarna, “The Greatest Jew in the World since Jesus Christ,” 348.

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book Jewish Justices of the Supreme Court: From Brandeis to Kagan (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017). Brandeis’s formal leadership of the American Zionist movement continued for seven years, from 1914 to 1921. During this period, Brandeis spearheaded a dramatic rise in Zionist movement memberships and fundraising, and helped to organize new Zionist chapters throughout the United States. Brandeis strongly supported the work of Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah (the American Women’s Zionist organization), and Hadassah’s program of practical health care in Palestine.35 Brandeis personally sought and won for the Zionist movement the financial support of several wealthy American Jewish philanthropists, who were his friends, such as the Filene’s Department Store Vice President Louis E. Kirstein of Boston, the financier and Washington Post owner Eugene Meyer, and Nathan Straus, the president of Macy’s. Prominent non-Jews, such as Norman Hapgood, the editor of Harper’s Weekly, became interested in Zionism because of their friendship with Brandeis, and for the first time the Zionist movement thus “gained access to major non-Jewish journals of opinion.”36 Beginning in 1917, Brandeis also played a crucial behind-the-scenes role in formulating and winning Wilson administration support for the Balfour Declaration, and helped author what became the official program of the American Zionist movement, the so-called Pittsburgh Program of 1918.37 Brandeis became so devoted to the Zionist cause that, for a short time in 1917, he gave serious thought to resigning from the Supreme Court to devote himself full-time to work on behalf of Zionism. Even after stepping down from the leadership of the American Zionist movement in 1921, following a bitter dispute with the eminent European Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann, Brandeis would continue to play an important behind-the-scenes role in Zionist affairs throughout his tenure on the Court during the 1920s and 1930s. As the best-known American Zionist leader of his era, Brandeis gave legitimacy to Zionism, and made it fashionable amongst Jews and Christians alike. Through his leadership of the American Zionist movement from 1916 to 1921, and his continuing involvement in Zionist affairs thereafter, Brandeis was and remains the only Jewish Supreme Court justice to have combined service on the Court with a leadership role in American Jewish public life.

35 Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition, 96–97. 36 Sarna, “The Greatest Jew in the World since Jesus Christ,” 357. 37 Ibid.

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Part of Brandeis’s enduring Jewish legacy is also attributable to the fact that he was the first Supreme Court justice to hire Jewish law clerks, setting an historic precedent that subsequent Supreme Court justices, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, would follow. The position of the Supreme Court law clerk began with the appointment of Justice Horace Gray in 1882. Gray had begun the practice of hiring a law clerk while serving as chief judge of Massachusetts’s Supreme Judicial Court, and Brandeis, who had graduated Harvard Law School with the highest scholastic average in the school’s history, had been one of his clerks. For many years, Horace Gray and other Supreme Court justices who hired clerks “paid for them out of their own pockets until 1922, when Congress allowed each justice to hire one clerk at an annual salary of $3,600.”38 In 1924, Congress made law clerk positions at the Supreme Court permanent. Gray relied on Harvard Law School faculty to select the law clerks for him, as did Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. who was appointed to Gray’s seat on the Supreme Court in 1902. Upon his joining the Harvard Law School faculty in 1915, Felix Frankfurter selected the clerks for Holmes, and, upon his appointment in 1916, Brandeis asked Frankfurter to do the same for him. The first law student Frankfurter chose for Brandeis, Calvert Magruder, clerked for one year. The next two Harvard students, William A. Sutherland and Dean Acheson, stayed on for two years, and the rest of Brandeis’s clerks served for one year each. It has long been assumed that Brandeis, like Holmes, automatically took the clerks that Frankfurter recommended. “As for choosing the man,” Brandeis told Frankfurter, “I shall leave your discretion to act untrammeled.”39 Brandeis had encouraged his law clerks to use their Supreme Court clerkships as a springboard to go into law school teaching and/or government service. “Other things being equal,” he wrote to Frankfurter, “it [was] always preferable to take someone whom there is reason to believe will become a law teacher.” Brandeis was notably successful in attaining this goal for his law clerks, as more than half—fifty-two percent—of his law clerks obtained academic appointments.40 His first clerk, Calvert Magruder, who had been Frankfurter’s

38 Ibid., 464. 39 Louis D. Brandeis, letter to Felix Frankfurter, October 23, 1922, as quoted in Urofsky, Louis D. Brandeis and the Progressive Tradition, 465. 40 William E. Nelson, Harvey Rishikof, I. Scott Messinger, and Michael Jo, “The Liberal Tradition of the Supreme Court Clerkship: Its Rise, Fall, and Reincarnation,” Vanderbilt Law Review 62, no.6 (2009): 1759.

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student before clerking for Brandeis, later returned to Harvard Law School to teach, becoming a full professor at the age of thirty-one. Magruder worked for several New Deal agencies, before Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed him to a federal judgeship on the US Court of Appeals. Paul Freund, who would teach at Harvard Law School for more than forty years, became one of the foremost legal scholars of his generation, and was considered to have been “the dominant figure of his time in the field of constitutional law.”41 Louis Jaffe, who, upon Frankfurter’s recommendation, served as Brandeis’s law clerk during the 1934 Court term, was a professor and dean of the University of Buffalo Law School, before returning to Harvard Law School, where he would teach until his retirement. David Riesman, Brandeis’s clerk during the 1935 term, began his academic career as a law professor at the University of Buffalo, where he devoted his early scholarship to analyzing the interplay between law and society. After joining the social science faculty of the University of Chicago in 1949, Riesman would gain both fame and celebrity as one of the most influential and popular sociologists of the twentieth century with his best-selling book The Lonely Crowd. Brandeis was also proud of his law clerks who entered government service, such as James Landis, who (on his recommendation) served as a member of the Federal Trade Commission and as chairman of FDR’s Security and Exchange Commission, before beginning an academic career at Harvard Law School, where he would serve as dean from 1938 to 1946. Over the years, Brandeis would maintain an especially close relationship with Dean Acheson, who clerked for Brandeis from 1919 to 1921. Brandeis would personally recommend Acheson to Franklin D. Roosevelt for appointment as solicitor general in 1933, and Acheson would later serve as an assistant secretary of state and assistant secretary of the treasury, before being appointed secretary of state by President Truman in 1948. When Acheson was appointed assistant secretary of state for economic affairs by FDR, he asked Justice Brandeis to administer the oath of office.42 Beginning with Brandeis, Supreme Court clerkships became the most coveted and prestigious attainments, and avenues of upward mobility within the legal profession for ambitious Jewish law school graduates, especially those coming from poor, immigrant backgrounds. Several of the Harvard Law School students that Felix Frankfurter selected as law clerks for Brandeis were 41 Eric Pace, “Paul A. Freund, Authority on Constitution, Dies at 83,” New York Times, February 6, 1992. 42 Todd C. Peppers, “Isaiah and His Young Disciples: Justice Brandeis and His Law Clerks,” Journal of Supreme Court History 34, no. 1 (2009): 88.

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Jewish. A few of these Jewish Harvard Law School graduates first clerked for Julian Mack, Learned Hand, or other Federal judges, before moving up to their Supreme Court clerkships with Brandeis. Mack, the first Jew appointed to a Federal judgeship, had first met Brandeis in 1887 when, as a law student at Harvard, he had been one of the founders of the Harvard Law Review, which Brandeis helped fund and sponsor. Almost immediately upon his appointment to a Federal judgeship on the US Court of Appeals in 1911, Julian Mack had begun a tradition of choosing his law clerks from among the top Harvard Law graduates, as recommended to him first by Harvard Law School Dean Roscoe Pound and then by Felix Frankfurter. Brandeis, like Mack and Frankfurter, was very interested in placing Jewish Harvard Law School graduates who, because of antisemitism still prevalent within the legal profession, would otherwise have had few Supreme Court clerkship opportunities. Prior to Brandeis’s appointment, no Jewish Law School graduate had ever served as a clerk to a Supreme Court justice. During the 1920s and the 1930s, the “overwhelming majority” of Brandeis’s law clerks were Jewish.43 Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the country’s major law schools had few if any Jews on their faculty. During his twenty-five years as a law professor at Harvard, before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Felix Frankfurter was the one and only Jewish member of the faculty. Brandeis sought to change this situation. During his years on the Court, Brandeis had “made a special project of finding law faculty positions for young Jewish lawyers whom he regarded as particularly talented.”44 He was notably successful in this effort. Within a few years of Frankfurter’s appointment to the Supreme Court, two of Brandeis’s law clerks, Paul Freund and Louis Jaffe, would succeed Frankfurter on the faculty of Harvard Law School, establishing a precedent for the appointment of a growing number of Jewish Harvard Law professors during the 1950s and 1960s. Brandeis, with the help of Judge Julian Mack, was able to place his law clerk Nathaniel Nathanson on the Northwestern University Law School faculty, which had not hired a Jew since Mack had taught there briefly in the 1890s. Nathanson, who had clerked for Julian Mack before serving as one of Brandeis’s law clerks in 1934, would teach law at Northwestern for several decades, and would be the first of several Jews to serve on the Northwestern Law faculty during his long tenure there. Also, before his appointment at Harvard, Jaffe would break 43 Ibid., 76; and Strum, Louis D. Brandeis, 359. 44 Robert A. Burt, Two Jewish Justices: Outcasts in the Promised Land (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 65.

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a major glass ceiling for Jews in the American legal profession by becoming the first Jewish dean of a law school, at the University of Buffalo, in 1948. One of Brandeis’s law clerks, Harry Shulman, would later break another major glass ceiling for Jews in the American legal profession by becoming the first Jewish dean of Yale Law School in 1951. Schulman had been Brandeis’ law clerk for the 1929 Court term. In the fall of 1929, when Brandeis was encouraging Shulman to seek a law school teaching position, Frankfurter was still the only Jew on the Harvard Law School faculty, as he had been since his appointment in 1914. There were no Jews on the law school faculties of Yale, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, or Northwestern. In October 1929, Brandeis wrote to Frankfurter asking for his help in finding a law school teaching position for Shulman. “It seems to me,” Brandeis wrote, “that a great service could be done generally to American law and to the Jews by placing desirable ones in the law school faculties. There is in the Jew a certain potential spirituality and sense of public service which can be more easily aroused and directed, than at present is discernible in American non-Jews.”45 Brandeis specifically mentioned in this letter to Frankfurter that a faculty member at Yale had told him that “the right man there would find no opposition on the score of anti-Semitism.”46 Shulman was apparently the right man: A Russian-born graduate of Brown University and a student of Frankfurter’s at Harvard Law School, Shulman joined the Yale Law School faculty in 1930, immediately following his clerkship with Justice Brandeis. At the age of thirty-six, Shulman was first considered for the Yale Law School deanship in 1939, while Brandeis, who publicly voiced his support for Shulman’s appointment, was concluding his final term as a justice on the Court. Despite the fact that legal scholars and eminent attorneys from throughout the country supported Shulman’s appointment as dean, and that one of the nation’s most respected jurists Judge Learned Hand wrote “my choice remains Harry Shulman,” because of antisemitic opposition to the appointment, Shulman was not selected.47 When, seventeen years later, in 1953, Shulman’s name was again presented to the Yale Corporation for appointment as dean of the law school, 45 Louis D. Brandeis, letter to Felix Frankfurter, October 13, 1929, in Half Brother, Half Son: The Letters of Louis D. Brandeis to Felix Frankfurter, ed. Melvin I. Urofsky and David W. Levy, 395 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); and quoted in Burt, Two Jewish Justices, 65; and Peppers, “Isaiah and His Young Disciples,” 76. 46 Louis D. Brandeis, letter to Felix Frankfurter, October 13, 1929; Peppers, “Isaiah and His Young Disciples,” 76; and Burt, Two Jewish Justices, 65. 47 Dan A. Oren, Joining the Club: A History of Jews and Yale (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 126.

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a new fight broke out “entirely because of the Jewish issue.” An enthusiastic sixpage letter of support for Shulman sent by former Brandeis law clerk and former secretary of state Dean Acheson to his fellow trustees on the Yale Corporation played a major role in convincing the Yale trustees to confirm Shulman’s appointment as dean.48 Shulman would be the first of a number of Jews to serve as dean of Yale Law School over the next several decades. Not all of Brandeis’s Jewish law clerks sought jobs in academia or the government. As Harvard Law School graduates, with a prestigious Supreme Court clerkship now on their resumes, some received (and accepted) job offers from elite Wall Street law firms that had previously hired few (if any) Jews. Henry J. Friendly, for example, the editor-in-chief of the Harvard Law Review, who legend has it achieved the highest grade point average at Harvard Law School since Brandeis himself was a student there, and clerked for Brandeis in 1929, turned down a teaching job at Harvard Law to accept a more lucrative offer at Root, Clark, one of only two Wall Street law firms with a Jewish partner.49 Friendly continued to practice law in New York City until 1959, when President Eisenhower appointed him to a federal judgeship, on the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, where he served until his death in 1986, establishing an enviable reputation as one of the greatest American jurists of the twentieth century. During the 1960s, Henry Friendly and Harvard Law School professor Paul Freund, one of the nation’s most renowned scholars of constitutional law, who had served as Brandeis’s law clerk in 1934 and, like Friendly, had been one of Felix Frankfurter’s star protégés at Harvard, would be considered for appointment to the Supreme Court by three presidents. As the first Supreme Court justice to hire Jewish law clerks, Brandeis introduced a new dimension of religious diversity that had heretofore been absent from the Supreme Court. Moreover, in hiring Jewish law clerks, and helping them to find employment in academia and the federal government, as well as in private practice, Brandeis did much to promote the advancement of Jewish lawyers within the American legal profession. This achievement is an important part of his enduring Jewish legacy that should not be forgotten.

48 Ibid., 279. 49 David M. Dorsen, Henry J. Friendly: Greatest Judge of His Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 32.

4

Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life* For close to sixty years, Mayer Sulzberger (1843–1923) played an extraordinary role in American Jewish public life, exercising a profound and far-reaching influence on the leadership and direction of Jewish organizational life in America. A founder of the Jewish Publication Society in 1888, he served as chairman of its publication committee during its first thirty-five years and did more than anyone else to shape its policies. Together with Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus, Felix Warburg, and his cousin Cyrus Adler, among others, Sulzberger played an instrumental role in organizing the American Jewish Committee and served as its first president. Through his role in bringing Solomon Schechter to America, helping to reorganize the Jewish Theological Seminary, and his extraordinary benefactions to the seminary’s library, it can be said without exaggeration that Mayer Sulzberger was one of the most important early leaders of Conservative Judaism in America. Sulzberger’s influence and legacy as one of the most respected Jewish communal leaders of his generation lay in his unique ability to bridge worlds that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had little common ground. A learned and observant Jew, and a patron of Jewish libraries and scholarship, he was also well known and respected in the world of American law and government. One of the most eminent members of the Philadelphia Bar, and “the first Jew who identified himself as a Jew to ascend the Bench in Philadelphia,”1 he was during his lifetime one of the foremost Jewish jurists in America. A pillar of the Republican Party and a personal friend of William Howard Taft, who offered *

1

“Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life” was published in An Inventory of Promises: Essays on American Jewish History in Honor of Moses Rischin, ed. Jeffrey S. Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael (Brooklyn, New York: Carlson, 1995). Reprinted by permission of Jeffrey S. Gurock and Marc Lee Raphael. Maxwell Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” in Jewish Life in Philadelphia, 1830–1940 (Philadelphia, PA: ISHI Publications, 1983), ed. Murray Friedman, 173.

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him an ambassadorship to Turkey, Sulzberger enjoyed the “ear” of senators, governors, and presidents. Sulzberger was born in the small German town of Heidelsheim, where his father, Abraham, had served as both chazan and teacher. His mother belonged to the Einstein family, from which Albert Einstein was also descended. Following the Revolutions of 1848, the Sulzberger family immigrated to America and, in 1849, settled in Philadelphia, where Abraham’s brother Leopold was already living. Mayer Sulzberger completed Philadelphia’s Central High School at the age of sixteen, while receiving a thorough Hebrew education from his father as well as from Isaac Leeser and Sabato Morais, “who laid the foundation for his knowledge of Bible and post-Biblical Jewish literature in which he remained deeply interested all his life.”2 Although Leeser hoped that he would become a rabbi, Sulzberger decided on the legal career his father had urged. Since he had completed high school at such a young age, he was advised by Moses Dropsie, a friend of his father and one of the leading Jewish lawyers in Philadelphia, to gain some practical business experience before beginning his formal studies in law. In 1862, at the age of nineteen, Sulzberger entered the law office of Moses Dropsie, under whom he apprenticed, and was introduced to the study and practice of law. He was admitted to the Pennsylvania Bar in 1865 and, after being associated with the Dropsie firm for another ten years, opened his own law office in 1876. His practice proved both eminently successful and lucrative: during the next eighteen years, prior to his elevation to the bench, Sulzberger “accumulated a sizable fortune” and enjoyed a reputation as one of the most eloquent, learned, and respected attorneys in Philadelphia.3 In 1895, he was elected judge of the Court of Common Pleas on the Republican ticket, the first Philadelphia Jew to sit on this court since Moses Levy, who served on the municipal bench between 1802 and 1825 and presided over the famous Philadelphia Cordwainers’ Case, the first major criminal conspiracy prosecution of a trade union in American history.4 His popularity was so great that in 1904 he received the nominations of both political parties and was reelected without opposition. Sulzberger served for twenty years on the Court of 2 3 4

Alexander Marx, Essays in Jewish Biography (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1947), 223. Louis E. Levinthal, “Mayer Sulzberger,” The Shingle ( January 1939): 7. Jeffrey B. Morris, “The American Jewish Judge: An Appraisal on the Occasion of the Bicentennial,” Jewish Social Studies 38 (Summer–Fall 1976): 197–199.

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Common Pleas, the last fourteen as its president judge, making him in effect the foremost judge in the third most populous city in America. A pillar of the Philadelphia judiciary and a devoted Philadelphian, Sulzberger later turned down a nomination to the Pennsylvania Supreme Court because he did not want to move to Harrisburg. Following his retirement from the court, he would accept appointment as a member of the committee to revise Pennsylvania’s State Constitution, on which he would serve with great distinction. During his two decades on the bench, Sulzberger established a reputation as one of the most distinguished and scholarly jurists in the country. As a judge, “Sulzberger’s most valuable assets were a keenly analytical mind and an unerring sense of justice.”5 He was a legal “realist,” a student of things as they are, who viewed the law as “a living, growing organism, having its origin in human nature and custom.”6 As his friend Roland S. Morris, a leading Philadelphia attorney and civic leader, said of him in a memorial address delivered after Sulzberger’s death in 1923: “He liked the naked fact, stripped of all clothing of the imagination or of prejudice. He was a dangerous man to us lawyers when we had to make a statement of facts before him. He demanded accuracy and care, and with penetrating intellect he dug into the facts of a situation and brought forth the reality that lay behind the phrases.”7 Throughout his judicial career, Sulzberger was known as a bold and innovative judge, willing to risk reversal in an effort to chart new legal paths through his opinions. He would ignore or set aside precedents when he thought them to be “at war with new social rights” and would not raise legal fictions so high as “to operate to the detriment of any person.”8 Caring little whether the appellate courts reversed or affirmed his decisions, legal precedents meant less to him than did reason and principle. Thus, as Louis E. Levinthal, who knew Sulzberger well and was himself a judge in Philadelphia, points out in his thoughtful study of Sulzberger’s judicial opinions, “Judge Sulzberger was not infrequently overruled, only to have his views subsequently adopted as the prevailing law of Pennsylvania.”9 5 6 7 8 9

Levinthal, “Mayer Sulzberger,” 7. Louis E. Levinthal, Mayer Sulzberger, P.J. (Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1927), 107. Roland S. Morris, “Memorial Address,” in Addresses in Memory of Mayer Sulzberger (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, May 30, 1923), 7. Morris, “The American Jewish Judge,” 203. Levinthal, “Mayer Sulzberger,” 9. Sulzberger’s judicial opinions are discussed in further detail in David G. Dalin, “The Patriarch: The Life and Legacy of Mayer Sulzberger,” in When Phila-

4. Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life

First and foremost a Philadelphian, over the next fifty-five years, until his death in 1923, Sulzberger would leave his imprint on virtually every facet of Jewish organizational life of his adopted city and, at the national level, on most areas of American Jewish public life as well. A life trustee of the venerable Mikveh Israel Congregation and a vice president of the city’s Jewish Hospital, which his father had helped found, Sulzberger was the driving force behind the growth and development of Philadelphia’s Young Men’s Hebrew Association, of which he was the first president. Secretary of the board of Maimonides College, the first Jewish seminary in the United States, during the six years of its existence, he was an influential trustee of Gratz College from its creation in 1895 and a member of the original Board of Governors of Dropsie College, whose direction and destiny he helped to shape for fifteen years. One of the few Jewish members of the prestigious Union League Club, one of the most exclusive social institutions in tradition­bound Philadelphia, Sulzberger was also a trustee of the Jefferson Medical College and one of a mere handful of Philadelphia Jews after whom a city street would be named. Part of Sulzberger’s unique and enduring legacy as a Jewish public servant derives from his extraordinary achievement as a rare book collector and as a patron of Jewish libraries and scholarship. As Maxwell Whiteman has pointed out, Sulzberger was the “Maecenas” for a large number of Hebrew and Yiddish authors, the most famous of whom was the “wandering poet­mystic and author of ‘Hatikvah,’” Naphtali Herz Imber, who appealed to him for financial support. Numerous volumes of Hebrew verse, prose, philosophy, and rabbinic literature that might not otherwise have been published thus “found their way into print through Sulzberger’s charitable purse.”10 During his lifetime, moreover, Sulzberger was also the foremost private collector of Jewish books and manuscripts in America. Sulzberger’s love of Jewish books was insatiable. For several decades, much of his spare time and money was devoted to the collecting of rare Hebrew books and manuscripts,11 with the goal of building a private Hebraica collection that would eventually become the nucleus and foundation of a major Jewish library in America.

delphia Was the Capital of Jewish America, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia, PA: The Balch Institute Press, 1993), 61–62. 10 Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” 168. 11 Herman Dicker, ed., The Mayer Sulzberger-Alexander Marx Correspondence, 1904–1923 (New York: Sephor-Hermon Press, 1990), v.

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As Whiteman has noted, two governors of Pennsylvania who were also his friends—Edwin Stuart, a bookseller, and Samuel W. Pennypacker, “a zealous collector—kept him advised of all Hebraica that came their way.”12 At the same time, he had “a standing order with one of the largest bookshops in Philadelphia to deliver to him every new book as soon as it was published.”13 Over the years, moreover, Sulzberger cultivated a closely working relationship with the well-known Hebrew bibliophile, Ephraim Deinard, who “kept him informed of the first printing of ancient Hebrew works, plied him with choice incunabula, the best bibliographies and the rarest of manuscripts,”14 and spent days at a time at his Girard Avenue home, cataloging the Hebraica collection in his private library. Deinard had met Sulzberger, who soon became one of his major clients, shortly after his arrival in America in 1888. As Deinard traveled far and wide throughout Europe, the Near East, and Africa in search of rare Hebrew books and manuscripts, he would continually purchase items for Sulzberger’s growing collection. Within a few years, the shelves of Sulzberger’s exquisitely furnished Girard Avenue library contained what was widely recognized to be the most impressive private collection of Jewish books and manuscripts in the country. As early as 1896, Deinard compiled and published a Hebrew catalog of Sulzberger’s collection,15 considered the most impressive private collection of Jewish books and manuscripts in the country, all of which he would eventually donate or bequeath to the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. In 1906, in the aftermath of the Kishinev pogroms, Sulzberger helped to organize and became the first president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), the first Jewish defense agency in America. Although Sulzberger willingly shared his leadership of the AJC with close associates on its executive committee including Cyrus Adler, Louis Marshall, Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, and Max Kohler, his influence was decisive in shaping AJC policies and in resolving internal organizational disputes on a variety of public issues. In almost all areas of AJC decision making, Sulzberger’s was the commanding presence, with the

12 Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” 168. 13 “Judge Sulzberger, 20 Years on Bench, Dies at Age of 79,” April 20, 1923, Mayer Sulzberger Collection, clippings of obituaries, box 27, ff. 14–15, Annenberg Research Institute, University of Pennsylvania. 14 Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” 168. 15 Ephraim Deinard, Or Mayer, Catalogue of the Old Hebrew Manuscripts and printed books of the library of Hon. Mayer Sulzberger of Philadelphia, Pa. (New York: J. Aronson, 1896).

4. Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life

others, deferring to his judgment, “seeking his counsel and frequently his approval and conferring with him before acting on an important issue.”16 As the president of the American Jewish Committee between 1906 and 1912, Sulzberger’s greatest achievement was bringing about the abrogation of the Russo-American Commercial Treaty of 1832 because of Russia’s refusal to recognize United States passports when American Jews wished to travel freely in tsarist Russia. The history of the political campaign to abrogate the treaty and ensure the religious liberty of American Jews traveling abroad, led by Sulzberger, Louis Marshall, and Jacob Schiff between 1908 and 1912, has been thoroughly and critically analyzed by Naomi W. Cohen and other recent scholars.17 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the tsarist government had begun to utilize clauses in this treaty, which guaranteed freedom of navigation and commerce as well as the free entry of residents of the signatory states, to subject American Jews visiting Russia to the same restrictions under which their Russian coreligionists lived. Despite repeated objections from the American government, the Russian regime remained adamant. It even suggested that the American government consider refusing passports to Jews intending to travel to Russia, “thereby sparing itself the embarrassment of having its citizens discriminated against by a ‘friendly’ foreign power.”18 The leadership of the American Jewish Committee was especially “outraged” when it learned of a State Department circular issued on May 28, 1907, which stated that “Jews, whether they were formerly Russian subjects or not, are not admitted to Russia unless they obtain special permission in advance from the Russian Government, and this department will not issue passports to former Russian subjects or to Jews who intend going to Russian territory, unless it has the assurance that the Russian Government will consent to their admission.”19 This statement not only “established clearly the acquiescence of the United States government in Russia’s policy of discriminating against Jews bearing American passports, but made it appear that the State Department would

16 Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” 172. 17 See, for example, Naomi W. Cohen, “The Abrogation of the Russo-American Treaty of 1832,” Jewish Social Studies 25 ( January 1963): 3–41; and Gary Dean Best, To Free a People: American Jewish Leaders and the Jewish Problem in Eastern Europe, 1890–1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 166–205. 18 Abraham J. Karp, Haven and Home: A History of the Jews in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 223. 19 Best, To Free a People, 168.

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hereafter assist the Russian government in enforcing that policy.”20 To Sulzberger and other leaders of American Jewry, such US acquiescence to discriminatory restrictions upon American Jews by a foreign government relegated American Jews to second-class citizenship. As Naomi W. Cohen has noted, the State Department circular was “the catalyst in crystallizing the change in demand from diplomatic protest to outright abrogation” of the Commercial Treaty with Russia, as a means of defending the rights of American Jews.”21 During the presidential campaign of 1908, the issue of Russia’s refusal to recognize the rights of American Jewish passport holders led Sulzberger and his colleagues at the American Jewish Committee to put pressure on outgoing President Theodore Roosevelt and Republican presidential candidate William Howard Taft to secure Jewish electoral support by making an explicit statement on the passport question. On May 8, 1908, Sulzberger addressed a long and detailed letter to President Roosevelt, setting forth the arguments of American Jews.22 Subsequently, on July 17, Sulzberger wrote to Taft, who had been nominated the month before as the Republican party candidate for the presidency, as follows: You are doubtless aware that for some decades the Russian Government has refused to permit Jewish citizens of the United States to enjoy the rights guaranteed to all citizens by the Treaty of 1832, and that all representations hitherto made by our Government have been fruitless. . . . The platforms of both parties of 1904 and 1908 contain declarations on the subject. The conduct of Russia in flouting the passport of the United States is naturally resented by the people more immediately concerned, though, when the matter is studied, the grievance to the whole nation seems equally great. The [American Jewish] Committee feels that a more specific declaration in the earnestness of our government in pressing for redress would probably effect that which mere diplomatic writing has hitherto failed in.23

Concerned lest his Democratic rival capture the Jewish vote by promises of recognition of American Jewish passports, Taft succumbed to Sulzberger’s arguments and, in his campaign speeches, committed the new administration to solve the Russian passport problem. 20 21 22 23

Ibid. Cohen, “Abrogation of the Russo-American Treaty,” 6. Quoted in Best, To Free a People, 169–170. Quoted in “The Passport Question,” American Jewish Year Book (1911): 20–21.

4. Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life

Because President Taft had spoken out forcefully on the issue during the campaign and at his inaugural, a positive policy was expected. The new administration, however, to the chagrin of Sulzberger, Marshall, and their colleagues, chose a “prudent silence.”24 Determined to make one last “behind the scenes” effort to persuade the administration to act, on May 21, 1910, Sulzberger wrote to Taft “in his own hand, on personal stationery,” requesting a private meeting at the White House, together with Jacob Schiff and Cyrus Adler, “to lay before you our thoughts on the Russian matter.”25 At the meeting, which was held on May 25 in the presence of Secretary of State Philander Knox and US Ambassador to Russia William Rockhill, Sulzberger learned definitely that, campaign promises notwithstanding, the Taft administration opposed abrogation. As a result, a more concerted and forceful public campaign for the abrogation of the 1832 treaty, led more by Marshall than by Sulzberger, was launched on January 19, 1911. Although Marshall took charge of the public campaign for abrogation of the treaty, Sulzberger corresponded and met with Taft on several occasions during the following year. Moreover, together with Marshall, Schiff, and Adler, Sulzberger worked closely with Congressman William Sulzer who, through his position as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was leading the congressional fight for abrogation of the treaty. In July of 1911, at Sulzer’s invitation, Sulzberger delivered impassioned pleas before the House Foreign Affairs and the Senate Foreign Relations committees for abrogation of the treaty. Sulzberger’s dramatic July 2 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was, in many respects, the turning point in the campaign to overturn the Russo-American Treaty. His eloquent and forceful address had a profound impact on several members of the House and Senate, heretofore neutral in the treaty debate, and generated widespread support for the adoption of abrogation resolutions in Congress. In response to his address, Sulzberger’s Philadelphia friend and political ally, Pennsylvania Senator Boise Penrose, pledged that as soon as Congress reconvenes, I will take this question up with President Taft and Secretary Knox. . . . While the President and the Secretary of State should be informed of the final steps contemplated, the action [to abrogate] will originate in the Committee on Foreign Relations of 24 Karp, Haven and Home, 224. 25 Mayer Sulzberger to William Howard Taft, May 21, 1910, reprinted in Lloyd P. Gartner, “The Correspondence of Mayer Sulzberger and William Howard Taft,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 46–47 (1979–1980): 134.

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the Senate and as soon as I return to Washington I will take up the matter with Senator Cullom, Chairman of the Committee, and will use all my influence to remove the reproach to American traditions which has marked the discrimination of Russia against some of our most loyal and brilliant citizens.26

It is of more than passing significance that Sulzberger, rather than Marshall, argued the AJC case for abrogation of the Russo-American Treaty before the Republican-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It was more than an ex officio deference to Sulzberger’s office of president, to which Marshall would succeed the following year. Marshall’s deference to Sulzberger on this, as on other strategic aspects of the abrogation campaign, was a tribute to Sulzberger’s extraordinary oratorical abilities, judicial eminence, and stature as the preeminent Jewish Republican in America. It was, moreover, a tribute to the personal esteem in which Sulzberger was held by President Taft. More than Louis Marshall or any other American Jewish leader of the period, Sulzberger enjoyed Taft’s personal respect and political confidence. As Lloyd P. Gartner’s edition of the Sulzberger-Taft correspondence so well documents, Sulzberger remained a friend and political confidant of Taft throughout the years of the abrogation campaign. While relations between Marshall, Schiff, and other Jewish leaders had deteriorated by 1911 as a result of the Russian passport issue, those between Taft and Sulzberger continued to be friendly.27 Alone among American Jewish leaders, only Sulzberger’s forceful case for abrogation would receive a fair hearing in the Taft White House, and with Republicans in the House and Senate as well. Thus, perhaps as much as Marshall’s efforts behind the scenes, Sulzberger’s memorable Senate address proved the necessary catalyst for emergent White House support and effective congressional action. Inspired by Sulzberger’s eloquence, the renewed efforts of Penrose in the Senate and Sulzer in the House eventually produced the desired outcome: On December 13, 1911, the House of Representatives passed a joint resolution instructing President Taft to notify Russia of American intention to abrogate the treaty. The 300–1 congressional vote demonstrated overwhelming national support for abrogation. When, to 26 “Senator Penrose’s Response to Judge Sulzberger’s Address before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,” in Mayer Sulzberger Papers, American Jewish Committee library, New York. 27 Gartner, “Correspondence of Sulzberger and Taft,” 125.

4. Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life

Sulzberger’s delight, at the instruction of Taft, Secretary of State Knox subsequently issued a notice of termination to the tsarist government, Sulzberger promptly sent a personal letter of congratulations to the president. In 1912, at the age of sixty-nine, Sulzberger retired from the presidency of the AJC to devote more of his time to Jewish scholarship and to the Jewish communal enterprise to which he was especially devoted, the Jewish Publication Society. Indeed, of all his many and varied Jewish communal involvements, the Jewish Publication Society was, perhaps, dearest to his heart. Sulzberger’s lifelong love of Jewish books and book collecting had been inspired and furthered by his revered teacher, Isaac Leeser, for whom the establishment of an American Jewish publication society had long been an unfulfilled dream. Sulzberger himself had first publicly advocated the creation of a Jewish publication society in an 1868 editorial in The Occident, to which he contributed regularly as a young man and which, “true to a promise made to his dying teacher,” he edited for one year after Leeser’s death.28 “With the radiant optimism that would characterize his lifelong efforts on behalf of American Jewry,” notes Jonathan D. Sarna, Sulzberger’s Occident editorial predicted a day when [America] would boast of a truly great Jewish publication society, whose ramifications shall extend over all this continent, whose presses shall teem with the wealth of Jewish learning, whose activity shall foster native talent, and whose munificence shall enable all to drink draughts of wisdom at its fountain, so that in all the land it shall be said of us: “Behold, Israel is a wise and understanding people.”29

Twenty years later, Sulzberger had a seminal role in helping to transform his (and Leeser’s) dream of a national society for publishing Jewish books into a reality. When the Jewish Publication Society of America was organized in June 1888, Sulzberger was a member of the original committee that drafted its constitution and bylaws. From its formation, moreover, until his death in 1923, Sulzberger would serve as the powerful chairman of its publications committee and, in so doing, would do more than anyone else to shape its policies, select manuscripts, and supervise both the content and format of the books it would publish. More often than not, Sulzberger’s own personal literary tastes or ideological positions were reflected in JPS 28 Marx, Essays in Jewish Biography, 226. 29 Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988 (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1989), 8.

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policy.30 He would personally seek out and recruit prospective authors as well. It was Sulzberger, for example, who was responsible for the JPS publication of Children of the Ghetto and for thus “making Israel Zangwill the bright star of the Anglo­American literary scene.”31 Having “despaired of finding an American who could write a good Jewish novel,” notes Sarna, Sulzberger wrote to his friend Lucien Wolf in London “in hopes of finding” a promising Anglo-Jewish novelist there.32 Wolf recommended Zangwill, whom Sulzberger met on a visit to London and subsequently, in February 1891, invited to write a novel for JPS. In this, as in so many of his other varied endeavors on behalf of JPS, Sulzberger’s intuition and foresight paid off. Upon publication in 1892, Children of the Ghetto immediately became “the most talked about book of the season” and, as Sarna has pointed out, sold well on both sides of the Atlantic, while the young society’s reputation “soared for having introduced to American readers a work of such renown.”33 It was also Sulzberger who commissioned his friend Solomon Schechter’s Studies in Judaism, a lucid and engaging collection of fourteen essays on Jewish history, religion, and theology, that remains, close to a century after its publication, a work of enduring significance and “unsurpassed” literary style.34 In his Studies in Judaism, Schechter presented “in popular fashion, intelligible to non-specialists and non-Jews,” much reliable information on a variety of Jewish subjects, from the “dogmas of Judaism” and “the history of Jewish tradition” to “Nachman Krochmal,” Jewish mysticism, and the nature of Jewish law. At the same time, as Jonathan D. Sarna has noted, he also put forward, especially in the introduction, “a thinly disguised brief ”’ for what Schechter called “the historical school” of Judaism, upon which the religious ideology of the reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary led by Schechter, and the emerging Conservative movement in American Judaism, would be predicated. Thus, notes Sarna, Studies in Judaism “was as much a scholarly volume of essays exploring Judaism in the past, 30 Thus, for example, as a staunch non-Zionist who remained continuously distrustful of the Zionist movement, he “objected to discussions of Zionism in any JPS publications.” Ibid., 68–69. 31 Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” 168. 32 Sarna, JPS, 39–40. 33 Ibid., 42. Sulzberger’s important role in inviting Zangwill to write Children of the Ghetto and making possible its publication by JPS is discussed in Joseph H. Udelson, Dreamer of the Ghetto: The Life and Works of Israel Zangwill (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1990), 81–83. 34 Sarna, JPS, 59–60.

4. Mayer Sulzberger and American Jewish Public Life

as an important partisan statement regarding Judaism in the present,”35 written from a perspective that Schechter shared with Sulzberger and with other members of the Philadelphia Group, such as Sabato Morais, Cyrus Adler, and Solomon Solis-Cohen, who would also play instrumental roles in the founding and reorganization of the seminary. Upon Sulzberger’s strong recommendation, the Jewish Publication Society would publish (in 1908) a second volume of Schechter’s Studies in Judaism. Over the next two decades, moreover, it was Sulzberger who, together with Cyrus Adler, did more than anyone else to plan, shape, and oversee the publication of JPS’s monumental American Jewish Bible translation, which, upon completion in 1917, was recognized as a landmark in the history of American Jewish publishing and scholarship and quickly became the Society’s best-selling volume.36 One of the most influential and farsighted Jewish leaders of his generation, Mayer Sulzberger played a pivotal role in the creation and development of an extraordinary number of Jewish institutions and communal enterprises, both in his beloved city of Philadelphia and on the national stage. So profound was his imprint on virtually every cultural, religious, and political development in American Jewish life during his lifetime that he was considered by many to have been, in the words of Louis Ginzberg, “the outstanding Jew produced in America.”37 Regrettably, however, much of his formidable legacy as an American Jewish leader has been forgotten. As Maxwell Whiteman has pointed out, the varied dimensions and achievements of Sulzberger’s multifaceted public career remain unstudied and largely unappreciated to this day.38 Indeed, few if any of the other preeminent American Jewish leaders have been so neglected by American Jewish historians and biographers. In a 1988 poll of American Jewish historians asked to name the two “greatest (deceased) Jewish leaders,” for example, the name of Mayer Sulzberger goes entirely unmentioned.39 Alone among the “great” Jewish leaders of nineteenth- and twentieth-century America, Sulzberger has never

35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., 59. Ibid., 115. Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, 362. Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” 172. “The Greatest American Jewish Leaders,” American Jewish History 78 (December 1988): 169–220.

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been the subject of even one comprehensive or definitive scholarly monograph.40 Most of the other great American Jewish leaders—including, among others, Louis D. Brandeis, Oscar Straus, Stephen S. Wise, Abba Hillel Silver, Louis Marshall, Joseph Proskauer, Isaac Mayer Wise, Isaac Leeser, Henrietta Szold, and Solomon Schechter—have been the subject of full-length biographies, scholarly monographs, and/or dissertations. Even Cyrus Adler, Sulzberger’s cousin and protégé to whom he turned the mantle of Jewish leadership, has received increasing attention from American Jewish historians in recent years.41 A critical and definitive biography of Mayer Sulzberger, who can well lay claim to having been one of the outstanding Jewish leaders produced in America, is long overdue. With the publication of such a biography, one hopes, his unique and enduring contributions to the worlds of both American Jewish scholarship and public life will be better recognized and appreciated in our era, as they were in his own.

40 There have, however, been a couple of brief and hagiographical biographic profiles, such as Alexander Marx’s in his Essays in Jewish Biography, 223–228, and Harry Simonhoff ’s profile in his Saga of American Jewry, 1865–1914 (New York: Arco, 1959), 279–284. 41 On the recent scholarship on Cyrus Adler, see for example, David G. Dalin, “Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions,” AJS Review 10 (Spring 1985): 55–87, and three articles in American Jewish History 78 (March 1989) dealing with “The Role of Cyrus Adler in American Jewish History”: David G. Dalin, “Cyrus Adler and the Rescue of Jewish Refugee Scholars,” 351–362; Ira Robinson, “Cyrus Adler and the Jewish Theological Seminary of America: Image and Reality,” 363–381; and Jonathan D. Sarna, “Cyrus Adler and the Development of American Jewish Culture: The ‘Scholar­Doer’ as a Jewish Communal Leader,” 382–394. See also Ira Robinson’s excellent Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985).

5

Patron par Excellence— Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary* During his distinguished public career of close to sixty years, Mayer Sulzberger (1843–1923) was generally considered to have been one of the foremost Jewish leaders in America. As the “Patriarch” of what would come to be known as the “Philadelphia Group” during that period of American Jewish history in which Philadelphia was the “Jewish capital” of the United States1 and one of the preeminent Jewish public figures of his era, Sulzberger influenced American Jewish organizational life for several decades.

The Philadelphia Group, Maimonides College, and the Early Seminary Sulzberger’s rise to prominence as one of the preeminent Jewish leaders in America began in 1868 when he single-handedly edited and published the final volume of Isaac Leeser’s monthly, The Occident. And thus, as Solomon Solis-Cohen would note in his memorial eulogy for Sulzberger in 1923, “did Elijah cast his mantle upon Elisha.”2 Sulzberger readily accepted the mantle of

*

1

2

“Patron par Excellence: Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary” was published in volume one of the two-volume collection Tradition Renewed: A History of the Jewish Theological Seminary, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1997). Reprinted by permission of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, Inc. The most detailed and illuminating historical study and analysis of the Philadelphia Group and its legacy during this era of American Jewish history is to be found in Murray Friedman, ed., When Philadelphia Was the Capital of Jewish America (Philadelphia, PA: The Balch Institute Press, 1993). Solomon Solis-Cohen, “Memorial Address,” in Addresses in Memory of Mayer Sulzberger (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, May 30, 1923), 26.

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Jewish communal leadership and responsibility that Leeser had bequeathed to him. During the last two years of Leeser’s life, he involved Sulzberger in the creation and early leadership of Maimonides College, which opened its doors in October 1867, one of the first rabbinical schools in nineteenth-century America. For several years, Sulzberger had shared Leeser’s dream of organizing a theological seminary for the training and education of an “American Jewish ministry.” The idea for a Jewish theological seminary did not, of course, originate with Leeser and Sulzberger, who were already familiar with the early development and curriculum of several “modern” rabbinical seminaries that had already been established in Europe by 1867. The first of these, the Collegio Rabbinico Italiano, which had been founded in Padua by Isaac Samuel Reggio in 1829, and the Jüdisch-Theologisches Seminary, which had been established in Breslau by Zacharias Frankel in 1854, served as models for all future seminaries in Europe and America. In contrast to the traditional yeshivot, their seminary curriculums, like that of Maimonides College and, subsequently, the Jewish Theological Seminary, demanded a mastery of the vernacular and a knowledge of a wide range of secular and extra-talmudic Jewish studies. Leeser closely watched the development and emerging curriculum of other modern Jewish seminaries, such as Jews College, which had been founded in London in 1855, and the Israelitisch-Theologische Lehranstalt, established by Adolph Jellinek in Vienna seven years later.3 And yet, as Lance Sussman has recently pointed out, while Leeser was “certainly aware” of these European developments, “he was probably more directly influenced by the rapid expansion of theological studies in the United States during the first half of the nineteenth century.”4 Only a few of the 516 American colleges founded in America prior to the Civil War had not been church affiliated, and “the dominant motive in the founding of colleges,” as Winthrop S. Hudson has noted, “was to provide an educated ministry for the churches.”5 Specifically theological education, with which Leeser, Sulzberger, and other members of the Philadelphia group had become quite familiar, also evolved during this period, prior to the creation of Maimonides College. In Philadelphia itself, two prestigious seminaries, the Protestant Episcopal Divinity School (1862) and 3 4 5

Lance J. Sussman, Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1995), pre-publication manuscript edition, 235. Ibid. Winthrop S. Hudson, Religion in America, 2nd ed. (New York: Scribner’s, 1973), 154–157; and Sussman, Isaac Leeser.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

the Lutheran Theological Seminary (1864), had been established just prior to the founding of Maimonides College,6 and were pointed to as examples of what dedicated lay leaders and clergy working together could accomplish. Leeser, who had first proposed that a Jewish theological school be created in America as early as 1841,7 had, over the next two decades, continued to “campaign” for the establishment of a rabbinical seminary in Philadelphia. Gradually, “his words fell on receptive ears,”8 and on November 6, 1864, a group of prominent Philadelphia Jewish leaders, led by Abraham Hart, a distinguished publisher and civic leader who was also president of the Board of Delegates of American Israelites, and Philadelphia attorney and philanthropist Moses A. Dropsie, met to discuss the establishment of such an institution and formed an executive committee of the Board of Delegates to work towards its creation. Almost three years later, in May 1867, this executive committee of the Board of Delegates formally voted to establish such a seminary, to be called Maimonides College, and elected seven trustees who were to preside over the administration and financial development of the institution. Sulzberger, the youngest of the trustees, was also designated secretary of its board, four of whose members were from Philadelphia, the other three being from New York. They immediately went to work, appointing a faculty of five, which was led by Leeser, who also served as provost, and designing a curriculum.9 Pledges totaling $6,635 were secured, as well as scholarship money for the students, and on July 1, 1867, the trustees “officially announced” the forthcoming opening of the school that October. From the college’s inception, Sulzberger, in his capacity as secretary of the board of the college, prepared published reports containing detailed descriptions of the emerging curriculum and the “nature of the studies” being pursued by the seminary’s students. Almost from its inception, moreover, Sulzberger also played the leading role in planning for the establishment and development of a college library, having been asked by the board “to take custody of the Library until such a time that a Librarian should be officially designated.” In December 1869, the board authorized Sulzberger, who would subsequently become one of the great

6 7 8 9

Sussman, Isaac Leeser, 235. Ibid., 234. Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963), 59. Bertram Wallace Korn, “The First American Jewish Theological Seminary: Maimonides College, 1867–1873,” in Eventful Years and Experiences: Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Jewish History (Cincinnati, OH: The American Jewish Archives, 1954), 166–171, 178–182.

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modern collectors of rare Hebrew books and manuscripts, to spend “up to five hundred dollars” in bids for a collection of Hebrew volumes from Amsterdam, which were to be sold at auction in New York City the following month. In what would be his maiden venture into Jewish rare book collecting, as well as overseeing Jewish library acquisitions, Sulzberger purchased the major portion of the collection, “numbering some three hundred and eighteen volumes,” for the sum of $184.73.10 Although its founders had hoped that the school would become “the most desirable institution for education of Jewish youth in the United States,” Maimonides College faced numerous obstacles throughout its brief existence. From the start, its biggest problem had been attracting students. Of the original eight accepted by the college, only two registered on opening day of October 1867. While they were joined by three additional applicants, only one of the five paid any tuition, and the original two students dropped out of the program after one year.11 By early 1873, with only one student remaining at the college, it had become inevitable that it would have to close its doors. Reflecting on the fate of Maimonides College, Bertram W. Korn has suggested that “even failures have a kind of immortality.” And, to be sure, Sulzberger, Adler, and the other members of the Philadelphia Group who would subsequently play such a prominent role in the creation and reorganization of the Jewish Theological Seminary, “benefitted directly and indirectly from the mistakes and failures of Maimonides College.”12 For Sulzberger, especially, the only person to serve as a trustee of both Maimonides College and the reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary, the college’s failure provided a blueprint of mistakes and obstacles to be avoided in reorganizing and expanding the Jewish Theological Seminary. The failure of Maimonides College, for example, convinced Sulzberger and his associates within the Philadelphia Group that the newly reorganized JTS should be situated in New York rather than in Philadelphia. Indeed, as Sulzberger and Adler would later recount,13 Jacob Schiff, Leonard Lewisohn, and the other New York lay leaders of the seminary had been ready to underwrite and support its relocation from New York to Philadelphia, a move that Sulzberger and Adler 10 11 12 13

Ibid., 183. Sussmann, Isaac Leeser, 239; and Davis, Emergence, 62–63. Korn, “Maimonides,” 195. See, for example, Cyrus Adler, “Jewish Learning in America,” American Hebrew 85, May 7, 1909, 4.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

pragmatically opposed. The center of American Jewish life, they recognized, was shifting from Philadelphia to New York, which was becoming the new “capital” of Jewish America, the largest, wealthiest, and most rapidly growing Jewish community in the United States. Already at the time of the initial founding of JTS in the late 1880s, the leadership of the Philadelphia Group had anticipated this trend, realizing that “with the daily influx of East European immigrants, the New York Jewish community, already the nation’s largest, would soon overwhelm all other American Jewish communities in terms of sheer numbers.”14 As early as 1885, in a letter to the American Hebrew calling for the establishment of a “Conservative” seminary, Adler “declared” that he was joining Morais “in hopefully looking to New York as the seat of its establishment,”15 a goal shared by Sulzberger. By 1900, the New York Jewish community had grown to five hundred thousand, while the Jewish community of Philadelphia remained only seventy-five thousand. As the wealthiest Jewish community in the country and the financial center of American Jewish life, New York Jewry could provide the ongoing financial support for a reorganized seminary that the Jewish leadership of Philadelphia could not. While they certainly lived comfortably, attaining a certain degree of middle-class affluence, the leadership of the Philadelphia Jewish community, unlike their counterparts in New York, “were not men known especially for their wealth”16 with the monetary resources to guarantee the financial viability and expansion of the communal institutions they helped establish. Adler, for example, who was then working for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, could boast no independent wealth, living comfortably on the modest salary he drew as a federal civil servant. Sulzberger, who enjoyed a successful law practice prior to his election to the bench in 1895, was spending the large part of his disposable income each year building up his growing collection of rare Hebrew books and manuscripts, as well as his expanding law library. So too Solis-Cohen, who (during the 1890s) was building a successful (if not overly lucrative) private medical practice in Philadelphia, with some additional income from his part-time position as a clinical professor at Jefferson Medical

14 Robert E. Fierstien, “Sabato Morais and the Founding of the Jewish Theological Seminary,” in When Philadelphia Was the Capital of Jewish America, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia, PA: The Balch Institute Press, 1993), 82. 15 Cyrus Adler letter to the American Hebrew, “A Conservative College,” American Hebrew, December 13, 1885, 83. 16 Jonathan D. Sarna, JPS: The Americanization of Jewish Culture, 1888–1988 (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1989), 17.

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College,17 had much time and energy, but not substantial financial resources, to contribute to the struggling JTS. Their Philadelphia branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary Association, moreover, which they had been instrumental in establishing, was never able to raise anything near the sizable amount of money contributed by the seminary’s lay leadership in New York. Although it generally could boast about one hundred members, it could raise only approximately $1,500 for the seminary every two years, “with the amount declining steadily towards the turn of the century.”18 By contrast, New York’s Jewish leaders, such as Leonard Lewisohn, Daniel Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, Felix Warburg, and especially Jacob Schiff, were men of immense wealth, who were ready to use their vast fortunes to provide the necessary funds to ensure that struggling Jewish communal institutions, such as the newly reorganized JTS, remained financially afloat. As a result, Sulzberger, Adler, and Solis-Cohen “strongly advised” Schiff, Lewisohn, and their colleagues that the nation’s largest Jewish community should not be without an institution of higher Jewish learning and that the newly reorganized seminary, while retaining Philadelphia Jews on its Board of Trustees, should remain in New York.19 As Moshe Davis and others have noted, the initial creation, early history, and reorganization of the seminary in 1902, and the subsequent growth and development of the institution in the two decades following its reorganization, as well as the early shaping of Conservative Judaism as an emerging ideological movement, owed much to the influence of the “Philadelphia Group,”20 under the leadership of Cyrus Adler, Solomon Solis-Cohen, and, especially, Sulzberger. Although, as Robert E. Fierstien has pointed out, the seminary was “the product of many historical forces and the creation of many individuals,” it owed its initial existence primarily to the efforts of Sabato Morais and the small 17 Solomon Solis-Cohen’s medical career and leadership role in the early seminary and other areas of Philadelphia and American Jewish communal life are discussed in Philip Rosen, “Dr. Solomon Solis-Cohen and the Philadelphia Group,” and in Friedman, Philadelphia the Capital, 106–125. Solis-Cohen’s own reflections on the history of the early seminary are contained in his published address, The Jewish Theological Seminary, Past and Future, which he had delivered at the twenty-fifth annual seminary commencement, on June 2, 1918, and which was published in pamphlet form by the seminary the following year. 18 Robert E. Fierstien, A Different Spirit: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1886–1902 (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1990), 119. 19 Adler, “Jewish Learning in America,” 4. 20 Davis, Emergence, 250; and Maxwell Whiteman, “The Philadelphia Group,” in Jewish Life in Philadelphia, 1830–1940, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia, PA: ISHI Publications, 1983), 169.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

group of prominent Philadelphia lay leaders who staunchly supported Morais’s “Seminary project” during the 1880s. Since the failure of Maimonides College, on whose faculty he had served, Morais had long dreamed of establishing a new and more successful Jewish Theological Seminary in America. “A passionate and eloquent spokesman for Jewish tradition,” Morais had created a devoted group of supporters and disciples in Philadelphia, led by Sulzberger, Adler, and SolisCohen, who shared this dream and would help to transform “Morais’ Seminary vision into a reality.”21 Solis-Cohen had chaired the important second organizational meeting of the newly formed Jewish Theological Seminary Association, held in the vestry of New York City’s Congregation Shearith Israel in March 1886, at which the JTS constitution, drafted by Solis-Cohen in consultation with Sulzberger, had been ratified. Two months later, he presided over the organizational meeting establishing the seminary’s first Board of Directors, on which Solis-Cohen was elected to serve. Throughout Morais’s tenure as JTS president, Solis-Cohen, Sulzberger, and Adler continued to play public roles as eloquent proponents and defenders of the new institution, playing an active role in seminary affairs, participating in its biennial conventions, and giving the institution their fullest and most passionate support. Together they founded the Philadelphia branch of the Jewish Theological Seminary Association, established to help raise funds for their new seminary, whose regular organizational and fundraising meetings Sulzberger would invariably attend and address. Even after the death of Sabato Morais in 1897, the seminary’s ties to, and support within, the Philadelphia Jewish community remained strong. Indeed, much of the initial impetus for the subsequent reorganization of the seminary would come from Sulzberger and the other leaders of the Philadelphia Group. In the three years following Morais’s death in 1897, when the Jewish Theological Seminary Association was on the verge of bankruptcy, with insufficient financial and congregational support, they “were able to persuade Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and other ‘Yahudim’ of New York, with whom they mingled socially, to rescue the floundering institution.” It was Sulzberger and Adler who first suggested to Jacob Schiff, as early as 1899, the idea of a corporate reorganization of the seminary and its reconstitution under a new lay Board of Directors, to be chaired by their friend Louis Marshall, which would replace the largely rabbinic board that had governed and administered the old Jewish Theological Seminary 21 Robert E. Fierstien, “Sabato Morais and the Founding of the Jewish Theological Seminary,” in When Philadelphia Was the Capital of Jewish America, ed. Murray Friedman (Philadelphia, PA: The Balch Institute Press, 1993), 75.

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Association for more than a decade. Only such a newly constituted lay Board of Trustees, “reorganized on the basis of secularity,” wrote Sulzberger to Solomon Schechter in December 1899, would “command the financial support of the only people to be relied upon to maintain the Institution in permanence,”22 such as Jacob Schiff, Louis Marshall, and other wealthy New York Jewish leaders including Leonard Lewisohn, Daniel and Simon Guggenheim, Isidor Straus, and Felix Warburg. Under this plan for reorganization, initially proposed by Sulzberger and Adler and conveyed by Schiff (with whom Sulzberger had already “discussed the matter”23) to Marshall, Lewisohn, Guggenheim, Straus, and their associates in New York, Solomon Schechter would serve as president of the faculty, and Louis Marshall as chairman of the executive board, while Cyrus Adler would be the chief executive officer, in charge of the day-to-day administrative affairs of the institution. Sulzberger assured Schiff and Marshall that if this reorganization plan was effectuated, he would agree to serve on the Board of Trustees and play a more active role in the governance of the new, reorganized seminary than he had in the affairs of the old JTSA.

Sulzberger, Solomon Schechter, and the Reorganized Seminary Following the reorganization of the seminary in 1902, Sulzberger did indeed play a much greater and more influential role in Seminary affairs through his influential position on the Seminary Board of Directors, on which he would serve for twenty-one years, and through his historic role as the preeminent patron and benefactor of the seminary library, whose monumental growth and development he would do so much to foster and shape. Sulzberger would attend numerous JTS-related meetings and fundraising events in New York in the years ahead. Between 1906 and 1912 especially, during which time he also served as president of the American Jewish Committee, Sulzberger commuted regularly to New York from Philadelphia, often on almost a weekly basis. Not infrequently, during these visits to New York for the AJC, he would also meet informally with Schiff and Marshall in their East Side homes, or with Alexander Marx at his JTS office or at local bookshops, to discuss seminary business. While Sulzberger, who served as chairman of the new seminary’s library 22 Quoted in Norman Bentwich, Solomon Schechter: A Biography (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1940), 169. 23 Ibid.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

committee from its inception in 1903, willingly shared the leadership of JTS with Adler, Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, and other close associates on the JTS board, his influence was often decisive in shaping seminary policies. In a number of areas of JTS decision making for close to two decades, Sulzberger’s was a “commanding” presence, with Marshall, Adler, and Schiff, among others, deferring to his judgment and seeking his counsel before acting on an important issue. This was true not only regarding library matters and questions relating to Jewish public life and seminary relations with the larger Jewish and non-Jewish community, but regarding issues relating to the faculty and to faculty-administration relations as well. More than any other member of the seminary board, Sulzberger enjoyed the close friendship and respect of important members of the seminary faculty, such as Louis Ginzberg and Alexander Marx, whose relationship to Sulzberger will be discussed below. He also enjoyed a uniquely close personal and professional relationship with Solomon Schechter. Indeed, his increased involvement and influence in seminary affairs, beginning in 1902, was at least in part attributable to his friendship with Schechter, the distinguished reader in rabbinics at Cambridge University and world-renowned discoverer of the Cairo Genizah, whom Sulzberger was instrumental in bringing to America to serve as the first president of the reorganized Jewish Theological Seminary. Having first met Schechter on a visit to England in the early 1890s, Sulzberger and he became quick friends and began to correspond regularly.24 Their close friendship and correspondence, nurtured by their shared love of Jewish book collecting and scholarship, would continue until Schechter’s death in 1915. From the time of their first meeting, Sulzberger had hoped that Schechter might consider moving to America to join the faculty of the seminary, a hope shared by Adler, Solis-Cohen, and other members of the Philadelphia Group. In 1895, Sulzberger invited Schechter to deliver a series of lectures to celebrate the opening of Gratz College and, during his visit to Philadelphia, to be Sulzberger’s guest at his house on Girard Avenue. “Of course, you are to consider my house your home during your stay,” he wrote Schechter, “and you may reassure your 24 Sulzberger’s letters to Schechter, as yet unpublished, can be found at the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. Much of the Schechter correspondence to Sulzberger has been edited by Meir Ben-Horin and published as “Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger: Part I. Letters from the Pre-Seminary Period (1895–1901),” Jewish Social Studies 25 (October 1963): 249–286; and “Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger: Part II. From the Seminary’s Period,” Jewish Social Studies 27 (April 1965): 75–102.

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wife on the subject of your being taken care of. Somebody will see to it that you do not forget to eat, drink or sleep; you can lounge, read, write, and if the worst comes to the worst you can even devour one of your favorite Yemen Midrash MSS of which I am the possessor.”25 Schechter’s Gratz Lectures, which were widely quoted in the American Jewish press and “served to introduce Schechter to an ever wider audience,”26 were a resounding success. Erudite and witty, a man of enormous energy and “unmistakable charisma,” Schechter made an extraordinary impression on all the members of the Philadelphia Group who, “certain that he was the man to give intellectual and spiritual leadership” to the “Jewish Revival” they hoped for,27 became even more determined to bring him permanently to America. Thus, when Sabato Morais died in 1897, Schechter was Sulzberger’s choice to succeed him and to preside over the reorganization of the seminary. On May 9, 1897, Schechter wrote to Sulzberger seeking his initial advice as whether, and under what conditions, to accept the offer of seminary presidency.28 Over the next three years, as negotiations between Schechter and the seminary Board of Directors dragged on and Schechter agonized over the decision of leaving England for the seminary, Sulzberger was his constant “sounding board” and adviser. In letter after letter, Sulzberger counseled his friend to be patient and not to rush into an agreement until the seminary could guarantee a salary sufficient to provide for his and his family’s financial security. For example, in July 1899, Sulzberger cautioned Schechter that only if and when the seminary board could guarantee him “a legal contract . . . for five years at $4000 per annum, the sum of $20,000 to be gathered and deposited as a fund to secure these payments in the event of the failure of the Seminary,” should he consider accepting their offer.29 “What concerns me much,” he wrote to Schechter five months later, “is that

25 Mayer Sulzberger to Solomon Schechter, December 7, 1894; Sulzberger­Schechter Correspondence, Jewish Theological Seminary. 26 Abraham J. Karp, “Solomon Schechter Comes to America,” in The Jewish Experience in America, ed. Abraham J. Karp, vol. 5 (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1969), 115. 27 On this Jewish “revival” or “awakening” in turn-of-the-century America, see Jonathan D. Sarna’s recently published A Great Awakening: The Transformation That Shaped TwentiethCentury American Judaism and Its Implications for Today (New York: Council for Initiatives in Jewish Education, 1995). 28 Solomon Schechter to Mayer Sulzberger, May 9, 1897, in “Solomon Schechter to Judge Mayer Sulzberger: Part I,” 262. 29 Mayer Sulzberger to Solomon Schechter, July 21, 1899, Sulzberger-Schechter Correspondence.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

a proper contract should be executed before you irrevocably commit yourself ” to leaving England.30 When, in November 1901, Schechter finally decided to accept the seminary presidency, he personally communicated his decision to Sulzberger, who then happily “telegraphed” notification of Schechter’s acceptance to the seminary leadership in New York. In his November 23, 1901 letter to Schechter, congratulating him on his “wise” decision, which would be “for the advantage of Judaism and yourself,” Sulzberger first indicated to Schechter that he might give his valuable Jewish book and manuscript collection to the seminary library.31 Throughout their friendship of twenty-five years, Sulzberger continuously encouraged Schechter’s scholarship and, through his influential position as chairman of the publications committee of the Jewish Publication Society, financially supported Schechter’s scholarly research as well. In addition to Schechter, Sulzberger personally recruited, befriended, and supported the published scholarly work of other seminary faculty members. It was Sulzberger, for example, who was singularly responsible for recruiting the distinguished rabbinics scholar, Louis Ginzberg, and for commissioning the research and writing of Ginzberg’s monumental seven-volume Legends of the Jews. Born in Kovno, Lithuania, and educated at the great Lithuanian yeshivot of Kovno and Telz and later at the universities of Berlin, Strasbourg, and Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in 1898,32 Ginzberg had immigrated to America in 1899 at the age of twenty-five to accept a faculty appointment at Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati. By the time he arrived in New York, however, his appointment had been withdrawn33 and when a subsequent job with the Jewish Encyclopedia “also came to an abrupt end,” he began to seriously consider returning to Germany.34 Fortuitously, however, while visiting Philadelphia 30 Mayer Sulzberger to Solomon Schechter, December 18, 1899, Sulzberger­Schechter Correspondence. 31 Mayer Sulzberger to Solomon Schechter, November 23, 1901, Sulzberger­Schechter Correspondence. 32 Shuly Rubin Schwartz, The Emergence of Jewish Scholarship in America: The Publication of the Jewish Encyclopedia (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 1991), 56. 33 On the issue of Hebrew Union College’s withdrawal of its teaching offer to Ginzberg and some of the reasons for Isaac Mayer Wise’s decision to withdraw this offer, see ibid.; Harry H. Mayer, “What Price Conservatism? Louis Ginzberg and the Hebrew Union College,” American Jewish Archives 10 (April 1958): 145–150; and Stanley F. Chyet, “Isaac Mayer Wise: Portraits by David Philipson,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram W. Korn (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1976), 78–79. 34 Schwartz, The Emergence, 130–131.

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during the spring of 1900 to attend the annual meetings of the Oriental Society of America, Ginzberg met Sulzberger, who invited him to spend an entire day as a guest at his home and library, where they spent hours talking about Jewish book collecting and partaking of Sulzberger’s fine collection of cigars.35 Thus began a close personal and professional friendship that would last until Sulzberger’s death twenty-three years later. Soon thereafter, in his capacity as chairman of the Jewish Publication Society publications committee, Sulzberger offered Ginzberg $1,000 to write a three-hundred-page volume on the “Jewish Legends Relating to Biblical Matters.” As Jonathan D. Sarna has noted, Sulzberger’s interest in a book on Jewish legends relating to the Bible “probably had to do with the interest in folk legends displayed by so many Americans of his day,”36 while Ginzberg’s interest in pursuing such a project derived from a different source: he had written his PhD dissertation, at the University of Heidelberg, on biblical legends preserved in the Church Fathers “and was eager to expand his scholarly research in new directions.”37 At any rate, at Sulzberger’s urging, Ginzberg embarked on the project that culminated, many years later, in the completion of his seven-volume Legends of the Jews, which is widely acknowledged to be one of the “classics” of twentiethcentury Jewish scholarship. The $1,000 Jewish Publication Society commission offered by Sulzberger turned out to be an important turning point in his early scholarly career, enabling Ginzberg to remain in America and tiding him over financially until a more secure academic appointment materialized. Sulzberger facilitated that appointment for his new friend as well, recommending him enthusiastically to Schechter who, before the reorganized seminary opened for the 1902–1903 academic year, appointed Ginzberg professor of Talmud, the first member of his new faculty. Upon Sulzberger’s recommendation and his alone, Ginzberg, who had no prior teaching experience, was appointed a full professor, beginning a fifty-year association with JTS that would last until his death in 1953.

35 Eli Ginzberg, Keeper of the Law: Louis Ginzberg (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1966), 72. 36 Sarna, JPS, 131. 37 Ibid.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

Patron and Benefactor: Sulzberger as Book Collector and Founder of the Seminary Library More than any other individual, Mayer Sulzberger can be considered the founder of the seminary’s incomparable Judaica library, the largest single aggregation of Jewish books in the world. Almost from its inception, he was its most generous benefactor, its patron par excellence. As collector and benefactor, Sulzberger had a clear vision of what was needed to build a major Judaica library that would rival the great Jewish libraries of England and Europe, under the seminary’s auspices. In a major address delivered on April 26, 1903, at the dedication of the seminary’s then new building at West 123rd Street on Morningside Heights, Sulzberger formulated the following program for the upbuilding of the library and the acquisition of rare Hebrew books and manuscripts: In laying the foundations for our future library we have acted on the thought that while an institution organized for the study of a special science or profession, like this Seminary, needs a good general library, it must certainly endeavor to perfect a library for special purposes. Such a library should comprise as complete a collection as possible of all the works of Jewish science written in Hebrew and other languages. To gather this is a formidable undertaking. There are many thousands of such works. . . . From the year 1475, when Hebrew printing began, to the French Revolution, the chief recorded activity of the Jews is illustrated rather by their books than in their art. . . . No wonder they called printing the holy art; it was the only one in which they could make their appeal to the future. . . . So far as we know, there were about one hundred Hebrew books printed during the first twenty-five years after the Hebrew press was started, that is, from the year 1475 to the year 1500, and these were produced mainly in Italy, the smaller number in Spain and Portugal. After its expulsion from Spain and Portugal, the Hebrew press sought refuge in Turkey, a few years later in Bohemia, and later still in Germany, Poland, Holland and other countries, until in modern times it has been established in nearly every land. That a complete collection of these books will ever be made in any library of the world is too much to hope. The books, like their owners, underwent so many persecutions, expulsions and burnings that the relatively small editions of early times were exhausted by drastic means. Moreover, in comparing the early books of general literature with the early Hebrew books the fact will be noted that while general works of the early age can be found in perfect condition, the same is not often true of Hebrew books. The former give evidence that many of them were placed

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in stately libraries and daintily cared for, while the latter show hard and incessant usage. The Gentiles read their books; the Jews devoured theirs. The Bodleian Library at Oxford and the British Museum at London are, and perhaps will always remain, the most magnificent and complete Hebrew book museums in the world. But it is our business on this side of the Atlantic to hope and to work, undaunted by the magnitude of others’ achievements; we should hold in view the purpose to make our collection as nearly complete as the resources of the world may render possible, and in so doing we should spare neither thought nor labor nor money. Closely related to the acquisition of printed books is the acquisition of manuscripts of works, printed or unprinted. All that may be said in favor of the early printed books applies to manuscripts, and the latter have this additional qualification, that they sometimes serve to correct important errors in the printed books, just as the first editions of the printed books serve to correct important errors introduced purposely or inadvertently into later editions. I do not forget the fact that the highest use of these books and manuscripts must be limited to relatively few persons. Greatness is always rare, but its achievements are colossal. To compass the high ends for which we strive, the library must satisfy the needs of the few choice spirits as abundantly as it provides for those of ordinary scholars. In this resolution we but follow the thought actuating the most enlightened governments and learned societies of the world in creating their great libraries and museums.38

Shortly after delivering this address in August 1903, Sulzberger presented the seminary with three thousand books and four hundred manuscripts, at a time in which its entire holdings consisted of five thousand volumes and only three manuscripts.39 He also formally announced his intention to donate his whole valuable collection of twenty-four hundred books and five hundred manuscripts to the seminary. Included in this collection were forty-five incunabula published before the year 1500—close to half of the editions of Hebrew incunabula then known to exist, which became the nucleus of the seminary’s formidable rare book collection. Shortly thereafter, working in consultation with Alexander Marx, who was soon to assume his duties as the new seminary librarian, Sulzberger purchased the library of Solomon J. Halberstamm of Bielitz, 38 Mayer Sulzberger, “The Library,” Biennial Report of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1902–1904), 116–118. 39 Herman Dicker, ed., The Mayer Sulzberger-Alexander Marx Correspondence, 1904–1923 (New York: Sephor-Hermon Press, 1990), vi.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

Austria, which consisted of more than five thousand Hebrew and Jewish books and two hundred Hebrew manuscripts.40 In an August 1903 letter to Marx, who had not yet left Germany for America, Sulzberger had asked him “to proceed to Bielitz” and examine the Halberstamm library, for which Sulzberger had agreed to pay ten thousand marks, upon Marx’s positive appraisal of the library.41 In December 1903, shortly after Alexander Marx arrived in New York City to begin work at the seminary, the Halberstamm collection, together with Sulzberger’s substantial personal collection, was shipped to the newly dedicated seminary building in New York. At the Seminary Board of Directors meeting, held on January 11, 1904, the Sulzberger library gift was “officially” announced, with the accompanying letter from Sulzberger to Cyrus Adler, then president of the seminary board, which was read (in part) as follows: I hereby give to the Seminary a collection of about seventy-five hundred (7,500) Hebrew and Jewish printed books and about seven hundred and fifty (750) Hebrew manuscripts, all of which I have already caused to be placed in your building. They fairly represent the various branches of Jewish learning. . . . My hope is that the Seminary may become the center for original work in the science of Judaism, to which end the acquisition of a great library is indispensable. We and our successors must labor many years to build up such a library, but I believe that a good foundation for it has now been laid.42

The Sulzberger collection, the single largest donation ever made to a Jewish library in America, became the cornerstone of the emerging JTS library. Sulzberger’s only request, in donating his collection, was that each volume contain his bookplate and that “at some future time” he or his legal representative be “allowed to place” the Hebrew books that had belonged to his father and grandfather in “a separate case” in the library.43 Sulzberger would personally purchase and donate to the JTS library hundreds of additional rare Hebrew and Jewish books and manuscripts over the 40 Alexander Marx, “The Library,” in The Jewish Theological Seminary of America: Semi-Centennial Volume, ed. Cyrus Adler (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1939), 90. 41 Herman Dicker, Of Learning and Libraries: The Seminary Library at One Hundred (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary, 1988), 18. 42 Biennial Report of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America (1902–1904), 50. 43 Ibid., 50.

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years while, as chairman of the seminary’s library committee, he would oversee and raise funds for all general library acquisitions. In 1907, Sulzberger wrote to Alexander Marx, congratulating him on his recent acquisitions and on “their” library’s having “moved ahead” of the Municipal Library of Frankfort as the world’s third largest repository of Hebrew incunabula, ranking behind only Oxford University and the British Museum.44 That same year, Sulzberger personally acquired for the library Adolph Oster’s collection of 417 haggadot, which became the nucleus of the seminary’s incomparable collection of haggadot, which by 1939 would number 1,332 different editions.45 Between 1909 and 1911, he gave the library 364 rare Ladino books printed in Hebrew characters, 185 American imprints, and more than five hundred manuscripts, all of which had been purchased from Ephraim Deinard.46 In February 1913, Alexander Marx, in his “Report of the Librarian” to the seminary board, would announce another major gift “of the ever-generous friend of the Library, Judge Sulzberger,” a parchment manuscript “in an Italian Hand, of the 15th century” containing “in 350 folio leaves, the Commentary on Genesis and Exodus, of the famous Italian poet, Emanuel of Rome, a friend of Dante.”47 Several months later, Solomon Schechter, in his annual report to the JTS Board of Directors, would announce Sulzberger’s gift of “a remarkable copy” of the 1520 Latin translation of the Maimonides’s Moreh Nebuchim, which “is undoubtedly one of the best preserved in existence”48 and which “represents” the textual version “utilized by the great scholastic philosophers of the Middle Ages, such as Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus.”49 At the same Board of Directors meeting, Marx would report Sulzberger’s donation of “a fine copy of the Brescia Bible of 1494, which is distinguished in the history of the Bible Text by being that used by Luther in producing his epoch-making translation.”50 Year after year, during the last decade of his life, Sulzberger would continue to donate choice printed books 44 Sulzberger letter to Alexander Marx, October 21, 1907, in Dicker, Sulzberger-Marx Correspondence, 32. 45 Marx, “The Library,” 94. 46 Simcha Berkowitz, “Ephraim Deinard: Bibliophile and Bookman,” Studies in Bibliography and Booklore 9, no. 4 (Spring 1971): 144. 47 Marx, “Report of the Librarian,” February 2, 1913, “Board of Directors Minutes, 2 February 1913–21 November 1915,” JTS Library Rare Book Room Archives, 1. 48 “Report of President Schechter to the Board of Directors,” May 1, 1913, “Board of Directors Minutes, 2 February 1913–21 November 1915,” JTS Library Rare Book Room Archives, 3. 49 Marx, “Report of the Librarian.” 50 Ibid.

5. Patron par Excellence—Mayer Sulzberger and the Early Seminary

and manuscripts from his ever expanding collection. In 1915, Sulzberger would present the library with a rare first edition of the Bible printed in “Roumansch, a peculiar Ladino dialect,” as well as “leaves of unknown Spanish incunabula,” which were of special interest since they were “the only remains of books zealously destroyed by the Inquisition.”51 In 1922, Alexander Marx would gratefully acknowledge Sulzberger’s gift of “a beautiful copy of an incunabulum Latin Bible . . . the first Bible edition in small size,” printed in Basel in 1491.52 As his extensive correspondence with Alexander Marx indicates, Sulzberger’s support of the seminary library went far beyond donating books and manuscripts. As chairman of the seminary library committee, and as an experienced collector himself, he frequently advised Marx on how best to increase the library’s holdings. In addition to advising Marx on what to purchase, he often coordinated the necessary fundraising for the library, or provided the funds himself, enabling the library to expand its staff and facilities and to steadily increase its acquisitions.53 Shortly after the reorganization of the seminary in 1902, Sulzberger (in consultation with Adler) had organized the committee, whose members included Adler, Louis Marshall, Felix Warburg, and Judge Irving Lehman. Over the years, he would frequently convene library committee meetings, held in the seminary building, to deal with various aspects of library business and administration, from “questions concerning the treatment of manuscripts,” the hiring of library personnel, and the “general conditions existing in the library,”54 to the organizing and coordination of fundraising for the purchase of important private libraries and collections, such as the large private collection of the London lawyer and book collector Elkan Nathan Adler, consisting of thousands of rare Hebrew books, manuscripts, and Genizah fragments, purchased by the seminary shortly before Sulzberger’s death in 1923. “Almost like a father,” suggests Herman Dicker, “he taught him how to negotiate with bookdealers and derive the most from his limited budget.”55 At his death in 1923, the remainder of Sulzberger’s vast Hebraica collection was given to the library of the seminary. Always deeply appreciative of Sulzberger’s guidance, financial support, and 51 Idem, “Annual Report of the Librarian,” November 21, 1915, “Board of Directors Minutes, 2 February 1913–21 November 1915,” JTS Library Rare Book Room Archives, 1. 52 Idem, “Statement on the Library,” February 8, 1922, “Board of Directors Minutes, February 12, 1922–December 9, 1923,” JTS Library Rare Book Room Archives, 2. 53 Dicker, Sulzberger-Marx Correspondence, vi. 54 Marx to Sulzberger, June 3, 1918, in Dicker, Sulzberger-Marx Correspondence, 145. 55 Dicker, Sulzberger-Marx Correspondence, vi.

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friendship, Marx would call Sulzberger “the real founder of the Seminary library” as well as “the father of Jewish libraries in this country.”56

Conclusion One of the most influential and farsighted Jewish leaders of his generation, Mayer Sulzberger played a pivotal role in the early history and development of the Jewish Theological Seminary. One of the preeminent architects of Conservative Judaism, Sulzberger was instrumental in bringing Solomon Schechter to JTS and, subsequently, in shaping the early seminary into one of the foremost institutions of higher Jewish learning, with the foremost Jewish and Hebraica library, in America. His friends and associates on the Seminary Board of Trustees, such as Cyrus Adler, Louis Marshall, and Jacob Schiff, deferred to Sulzberger as the quintessential Conservative Jewish lay leader of their generation, the undisputed architect of the seminary library’s growth and expansion, and the institution’s patron and benefactor, par excellence. More than any other member of the seminary’s Board of Trustees, moreover, Sulzberger enjoyed the profound respect and abiding friendship of Solomon Schechter and many of his appointees to the faculty, who frequently sought his advice and willingly accepted his counsel. For Schechter, Louis Ginzberg, and Alexander Marx especially, Sulzberger epitomized the ideal of a learned and religiously committed Jewish laity that the emerging Conservative movement in American Judaism could and should produce. So, profound was the imprint that he left on virtually every cultural, religious, and political development in American Jewish life during his lifetime that he was considered by many to have been, in the words of his friend Louis Ginzberg, “the outstanding Jew produced in America.”57 As the centenary of the reorganization of the Jewish Theological Seminary approaches (2002) one hopes that Sulzberger’s unique and enduring contributions to the early growth and development of the seminary, and his formidable legacy as its quintessential lay leader, will be better recognized and appreciated in our era, as they were in his own.

56 Alexander Marx, “Mayer Sulzberger,” Proceedings of the American Jewish Historical Society (1925): 227. 57 Davis, Emergence, 362.

6

Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party* Introduction Between the mid-1890s and his death in 1929, Louis Marshall was one of American Jewry’s most influential communal leaders. Indeed, Marshall was considered by many to be the preeminent Jewish communal leader of his generation.1 He served, at various times, as president of Manhattan’s Temple Emanu-El, the most important Reform Congregation in the United States, as president of the American Jewish Relief Committee, and as chairman of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary, which he had helped to reorganize in 1902. One of the founders of the American Jewish Committee, he served as its president between 1912 and 1929. Together with Mayer Sulzberger, Jacob Schiff, and other Jewish leaders, Marshall played a key role in the successful campaign to abrogate the 1832 US Commercial Treaty with Russia. In so doing, he helped to ensure the religious liberty of American Jews traveling abroad. During the 1920s, Marshall helped expose and publicize the forged and slanderous nature of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. With others, he successfully pressured Henry Ford to admit his error in publishing them and to make a public apology to American Jews for the antisemitic agitation in his Dearborn Independent.2

*

1

2

“Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party” first appeared in the Jewish Political Studies Review 4 (Spring 1992). Reprinted by permission of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. David G. Dalin, “Louis Marshall,” in Jewish American History and Culture: An Encyclopedia, ed. Jack Fischel and Sanford Pinsker (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1991), 379–380. Ibid., 380.

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While a good deal has been written about Louis Marshall’s manifold contributions to American Jewish public life, his defense of Jewish rights, and even his views on Zionism,3 little attention has been given to his influential role in American politics generally, and in Republican Party affairs in particular. This chapter will be a modest beginning in trying to critically assess Marshall’s complex role in American political and governmental life, a subject long neglected by American Jewish scholarship. Born in Syracuse, New York in 1856, in 1876 he entered Columbia Law School, where he completed the two-year law school course in one year. Between 1878 and 1894, Marshall argued over 150 cases before the New York State Court of Appeals, evidence of his growing stature and reputation in the legal profession. In 1894, he moved to Manhattan, becoming a partner in the New York City law firm of Guggenheimer, Untermeyer, and Marshall. Recognized as one of the country’s leading authorities on constitutional law, Marshall soon emerged as one of the preeminent attorneys in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century America.4 Louis Marshall was a life-long Republican, whose support for the Republican Party never really wavered. As he wrote to Felix Adler, the founder of the Ethical Culture Movement, two weeks after the presidential election of 1900, during which Marshall had actively campaigned for the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket, “I am and have always been a Republican.”5 In every presidential election between 1896 and 1928, Marshall was a vigorous and vocal supporter of the Republican Party and its presidential ticket. William Jennings Bryan’s candidacy for president on the Democratic ticket in 1896 and 1900 decisively alienated him from the Democratic Party, which he would never consider supporting. Between 1896 and 1928, the consistent and unwavering Republicanism of Louis Marshall was unique within American Jewish public life. Throughout this period Marshall was unquestionably the most influential Jewish Republican in America not holding high elective or appointive political office. More than Jacob Schiff or any other Jewish communal leader of this era, Marshall endorsed Republican candidates for elections, took an active part in intraparty squabbles, and worked

3

4 5

See, for example, Morton Rosenstock, Louis Marshall: Defender of Jewish Rights (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965); and Jerome C. Rosenthal, “A Fresh Look at Louis Marshall and Zionism, 1900–1912,” American Jewish Archives 32 (November 1980): 109–118. David G. Dalin, “Louis Marshall,” 379. Louis Marshall letter to Felix Adler, November 19, 1900, Box 1571, Louis Marshall Papers, American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati, OH.

6. Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party

closely with Republican congressmen and state legislators.6 During this era, moreover, during which most Republican politicians thought in terms of a Jewish vote and developed their electoral strategies accordingly, Marshall’s political advice and endorsement was often sought by political leaders hoping to appeal to Jewish voters. As Marshall’s extensive correspondence, over many years, with officials of the Republican National Committee indicates, his political input and counsel was often solicited and appreciated.7 As his well-known letter to the editor of the Yiddish newspaper Der Tag, in support of the presidential candidacy of his friend Charles Evans Hughes in 1916, so well illustrates, his political advice was often sought—and was readily given—at election time by the Jewish voters.8 As we shall see, although Marshall deplored the concept of a “Jewish vote,” and the practice of Jewish block voting, he frequently used Jewish voting power—or, at least, the threat of Jewish voting power—as leverage in his dealings with political and governmental leadership in New York State and Washington.

Louis Marshall and the Doctrine of Political Neutrality As one of the most influential Jewish Republicans of the 1896–1928 period, and as a long-standing, dependable, and influential party supporter and contributor, Marshall had access to the inner circles of the Republican hierarchy “when the party was almost continually entrenched in Washington, D.C.”9 Always ready to use his high standing in the Republican Party to bring pressure on issues of Jewish concern, Marshall knew the potential of his political “clout,” as is indicated by a remark he is reported to have made to President Coolidge’s secretary: “I am not a politician, but you are possibly aware that a man’s political influence is not to be measured by his blatancy or by his activity in seeking office.”10 Although a pillar of the Republican Party, Louis Marshall was also the bestknown and most articulate proponent of the ideal of Jewish political neutrality, 6

David G. Dalin, “Jewish and Non-Partisan Republicanism in San Francisco, 1911–1963,” American Jewish History 68 ( June 1979): 493. 7 Much of the correspondence with officials of the Republican National Committee that this writer has studied is contained in the Marshall Papers at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, henceforth referred to as MP-AJA. 8 Marshall letter to editor of Der Tog, November 1, 1916, 9, MP-AJA. 9 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 54. 10 Ibid., 54–55.

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the German-Jewish political style that Naomi W. Cohen has so cogently analyzed. “Political neutrality,” as Professor Cohen has suggested, was the conception of political involvement adhered to by Marshall, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus, Mayer Sulzberger, and other members of their German-Jewish leadership circle who, while ready “to accept eagerly the political responsibilities of voting and office-holding that citizenship entailed, laid down strict guidelines circumscribing the political activity of Jews as a group.”11 This prescription for Jewish political neutrality, as espoused by Marshall and his colleagues, was predicated upon the assumption that “politics concerned the individual Jew but not the community. Jewish group interests, if indeed there were any, had no place under that name in any political forum.”12 This assumption led, in turn, to the following guiding principles that Professor Cohen has enumerated in some detail: (1) it was wrong for Jews to band together in separate political clubs; (2) rabbis or lay leaders had no right to advise the community on how to vote; (3) Jewish agencies must not use their influence to promote Jewish aspirants to political office; (4) Jews should not support a candidate just because he happened to be Jewish.13 The issue of the formation of specifically Jewish political clubs was one that continually divided German Jewish leaders such as Marshall and the newly enfranchised East European Jewish immigrants who, between the 1890s and World War I, were beginning to take an increasing interest in American politics and government. In 1895, Rabbi Joseph Krauskopf of Philadelphia sued for an injunction to prevent the founding of one such organization. His efforts aroused a public outcry against the club’s bid for a charter, and the bid failed.14 Jewish political clubs were especially distasteful to Marshall, who argued that a Jewish citizen should have “no distinctively Jewish interests with respect to matters of government.”15 Marshall’s opposition to the organization of Jewish political clubs was most forcefully articulated in a letter to Benjamin Marcus, in which he also delineated his philosophy of Jewish political neutrality in some detail:

11 Naomi W. Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation: The German Jews in the United States, 1830– 1914 (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1984), 129. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 129–130. 14 Ibid., 134. 15 Charles Reznikoff, ed., Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty, Selected Papers and Addresses (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957), 1:57.

6. Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party

My secretary informs me that you called to see me with regard to becoming a member of a committee to organize Jewish Taft Clubs throughout the United States. While I am strongly in favor of the renomination and reelection of President Taft, I am utterly opposed to any plan whereby the Jewish people shall segregate themselves from the remainder of the citizens of this country for political purposes. We have no political interests which are different from those of our fellow-citizens. We would subject ourselves to just criticism if we organized political clubs of our own. There is no such thing as a Jewish Republican or a Jewish Democrat. We are either Republicans or Democrats. The sooner that it is understood that we do not recognize a wall of separation as between ourselves and those who advocate the same causes, and do not contribute to the creation of one, the better it will be for all of us.16

As recent scholarship has suggested, the posture of German-Jewish political neutrality that Marshall espoused had its antecedents in the Know-Nothing era, which had left an “indelible stamp” on American Jewish political behavior.17 The politically impressionable new immigrants from Germany and Bavaria of the 1840s and 1850s witnessed both the abuses of “Protestant zealotry” in politics and also the attacks on Irish Catholics for reasons that included political separatism. Thus, for example, in 1854 the Citizen of New York City could write denying the existence of an Irish vote. We have always argued, the paper said, that “the Irish should not act together politically as Irish” or allow their votes to be delivered by priests or saloon keepers.18 Frightened by what might happen to a non-Protestant minority, immigrant Jews from Germany drew reinforcement for their disinclinations against overt Jewish political activity and Jewish bloc voting. By the turn of the century, the prescription for Jewish political neutrality, espoused by Louis Marshall and his colleagues, was rooted, above all, in opposition to both the theory and practice of Jewish bloc voting, in a steadfast unwillingness to recognize the existence of a specific “Jewish vote.” Thus, while Louis Marshall full well recognized the power of Jewish voters, especially in New York State, he consistently refused to countenance any suggestion that American Jews voted as a group. Marshall’s opposition to Jewish bloc voting stemmed, in part, from his not unwarranted fear that “there are always two who can play 16 Ibid., 2:809. 17 Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 131. 18 Ibid.

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at the game.”19 Jewish bloc voting could be potentially dangerous, he believed, by stimulating anti-Jewish counter voting. Marshall continuously called upon his fellow Jews not to vote as Jews but as American citizens; time and again he warned that in the polling booths Jews had to decide who would do the best job for the country. Marshall’s views on the “Jewish vote” were expressed in several letters that he wrote concerning Jewish support for the various presidential candidates during the 1912, 1916, and 1924 presidential elections.20 “It is needless to say,” wrote Marshall, “that there is no such thing as a Jewish vote. It would be a misfortune if there were. As citizens we give our adherence to the several political parties in accordance with our political convictions. It would be just as bad for the Jews to vote as Jews as it would be for any other religious denomination to vote as Catholics, Methodists, Presbyterians, or Free-Thinkers.”21 As a friend and staunch supporter of Republican Charles Evans Hughes in the presidential election of 1916, Marshall wrote a letter protesting the appeal made by Henry Morgenthau and other Jewish Democrats urging American Jewry to support President Wilson because of what he had done for the Jews: Not only is this an appeal to the Jews of America to favor the Democratic candidate for president, but it is based on the theory that they owe a special debt of gratitude to him because of the fact that he has made what the appeal terms a number of “brilliant appointments” of Jews to office. It is thus based on considerations which are an insult to the intelligence of the voters to whom it is directed, and in a sense degrades them politically by the intimation that they can be swerved in the exercise of their political franchise by racial or religious consideration . . . such an appeal to the Jews is a reflection upon their manhood and their citizenship.22

Marshall’s views on Jewish voting were also illustrated by his shocked reaction to a speech made by Israel Zangwill at Carnegie Hall, on October 23, 1923, in which the noted Anglo-Jewish author had stated: “If there is no Jewish vote today–and by a Jewish vote, I do not mean a vote for Jews—it is a disgrace, not 19 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 56. 20 See, for example, his letters to Benjamin Marcus, March 8, 1912; to George Blumenthal, October 5, 1926; to Felix Fuld, October 31, 1924, in Reznikoff, Selected Papers and Addresses, 2:809–813; as well as Marshall letter to Editor of Der Tog, November 1, 1916, MP-AJA. 21 Reznikoff, Selected Papers and Addresses, 2:812. 22 Ibid.

6. Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party

a policy to be commended. If Jews will neither use their vote to protect themselves nor to express their ethical conceptions, then they do not cumber the ground.”23 In reply, Marshall issued a statement to the press publicly repudiating Zangwill’s “indiscretion” and reassuring Americans that Jews did not desire such political self-segregation: “Our fellow citizens need not fear that Mr. Zangwill’s views on this subject are shared by any appreciable number of the Jews of the United States.” Zangwill, Marshall argued, misunderstood American conditions and had made his “utterly irresponsible” remarks purely for the sake of publicity. “We require no Jewish vote for any purpose,” protested Marshall in concluding his exchange with Zangwill.24 Marshall’s protestations notwithstanding, politicians in both major parties did not share the Jewish political neutralists’ assumptions concerning the nonexistence of a Jewish vote and the inappropriateness of making ethnic appeals aimed at Jewish voters. On the contrary, most New York City politicians thought in terms of a Jewish vote and balanced their tickets and developed their electoral strategies accordingly. By the time Louis Marshall had moved to Manhattan in 1894, the Jewish vote had become a significant factor in New York City politics. Republican reformers, working in municipal campaigns in the 1890s, had become aware of potential electoral support amongst Jewish immigrants. As Moses Rischin has noted, in some Tammany-controlled Lower Manhattan wards, Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe “came to hold the balance of power,” forming a “counterweight” to the regular Democrats.25 Theodore Roosevelt, who had been sensitive to new sources of urban Republican support during his years as police commissioner and governor, did not forget his friends upon reaching the White House. Thus, in the presidential campaign of 1904, many American Jewish leaders such as Jacob Schiff, Mayer Sulzberger, and Oscar Straus eschewed any pretense of political neutrality to support the candidacy of Roosevelt, who had gone out of his way to cultivate the good will, appreciation, and votes of American Jews. So, too, the editor of the American Hebrew, Philip Cowen, who actively supported Roosevelt’s candidacy, tried to circumvent the question of whether or not Jews should vote as Jews by agreeing that while there must be no such thing as a Jewish vote, Jews ought not to refrain from voting for a man who 23 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 56. 24 Ibid. 25 Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 228.

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“has indisputably done things that entitle him to the good will of our people.”26 Jacob Schiff, in actively promoting Roosevelt’s candidacy, went so far as to say that he could not believe that any eligible Jew would fail to vote for the President. The Jewish Republican vote for Roosevelt, he reiterated both publicly and privately, could be significant, as indeed it was. A majority of American Jews followed Cowen’s and Schiff ’s advice and voted for Roosevelt. In the presidential campaign of 1904, Yiddish community leaders enrolled 4,000 voters in the Independent Roosevelt Committee. The Roosevelt landslide, moreover, nearly carried a Jewish Republican into Congress, a “feat never before approached” on the Jewish Lower East Side. The poet Menachem Dolitzky celebrated the defender of Russian Jews against tsarist barbarism in a “Psalm to Roosevelt” beginning: “Father of our Country, how shall we honor thy name?”27 Despite their lip service to the ideal of political neutrality, a “growing ambivalence” as to the nature of Jewish political activity characterized the behavior of the leading Jewish supporters of the Republican Party. Thus, for example, Mayer Sulzberger, the first president of the American Jewish Committee and a pillar of the Republican Party in Philadelphia, called privately for a careful study of the Jewish vote at the same time that the Jewish notables arrayed at the Committee publicly continued to deny its existence.28 Louis Marshall, although one of the leading proponents of the doctrine of Jewish political neutrality, shared Schiff ’s and Sulzberger’s ambivalence. Indeed, even more than his German-Jewish colleagues, Marshall preached political neutrality while, more than occasionally, not practicing it. What Naomi W. Cohen has attributed to the political behavior of German-Jewish leadership generally— “they preached independence, but they hoped for a display of ethnic sensitivity on the part of the officeholder”—aptly described the actual behavior of Louis Marshall in particular.29 Thus, while Marshall deplored the concept of a Jewish vote, he knew there were Jewish voters who might be instructed and advised on both candidates and issues, and he not infrequently sought to instruct and advise them. This was his objective, for example, when he began to publish a Yiddish newspaper, 26 Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), 53. 27 Ibid. 28 Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 330–331. 29 Ibid., 142.

6. Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party

the Jewish World, in 1902. As Lucy S. Dawidowicz has noted, “Marshall wanted a Yiddish newspaper to support the Republican Party and the anti-Tammany forces associated with it.”30 In creating this newspaper, Marshall eschewed all pretense of political neutrality. He intended his paper to “support in the main” Republican candidates at election time, and to urge Jewish voters on the Lower East Side to rally to their support. Thus, during the 1902 electoral campaign, the Jewish World portrayed “the Democrats as demagogues and the Republicans as statesmen.” During the 1903 municipal elections, moreover, it urged its readers to support the mayoral candidacy of Republican Seth Low and the election of the Republican-Fusion ticket he headed. On Election Day, November 3, the Jewish World published a final “Appeal to Jews,” on its first Yiddish page and English page, to vote for Low and the Republican-Fusion ticket.31 In order to place the paper on a self-sustaining basis, Marshall used his influence in the Republican Party to obtain some state government printing funds. The Jewish World was financed, in large part, also, by the generous contributions of Jewish Republicans such as Jacob Schiff, Felix M. Warburg, Adolph Lewisohn, Mortimer L. Schiff, Daniel M. Guggenheim, Simon Guggenheim, James Loeb, and Marshall’s brother-in-law, Paul M. Herzog, who, together with Marshall, determined the policy and politics of the newspaper. Marshall, moreover, used his influence and contacts in non-Jewish Republican circles to generate financial support for the newspaper. Thus, for example, Marshall approached Henry Huddleston Rogers, a close associate of John D. Rockefeller and E.W. Harriman, and a “financial pillar” of the Republican Party, who contributed $1,000 in cash to launch the paper.32 One of the “many ironies” of the newspaper’s creation was the contribution of Rogers, who had no contacts with the Jewish poor and the immigrants and who was not known for his philanthropic benefactions. “His Republicanism,” suggests Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “was his only conceivable interest in the Jewish World.”33 Despite Marshall’s public disclaimers to the contrary, the Jewish World functioned as a Republican Party “organ” established to influence Jewish voters at election time. In one of his earliest articulations concerning the Jewish vote, Marshall pointed out to the editor of the Jewish World that he should 30 Lucy S. Dawidowicz, “Louis Marshall’s Yiddish Newspaper: The Jewish World: A Study in Contrasts,” Jewish Social Studies 25 (April 1963): 118. 31 Ibid., 121. 32 Ibid., 118–119. 33 Ibid., 119.

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recognize because all the other Yiddish papers backed Tammany Hall candidates.34 Marshall’s critics would, presumably, have viewed the political role of the Jewish World quite differently. Financed and “controlled” by Marshall and other Jewish Republicans who gave continuing lip service to the doctrine of Jewish political neutrality, the Jewish World was staunchly and unabashedly antiTammany in all of its political advice and instruction. Time and time again throughout his public career, moreover, Marshall used the Jewish vote as leverage in dealing with public officials on issues of Jewish concern. This was his strategy, for example, when in 1907, Marshall tried to enlist the political support of Governor Page of Vermont for the newly organized American Jewish Committee’s efforts against the Immigration Bill then being discussed by the United States Congress. After explaining the different arguments against limitation of immigration, Marshall added, rather meaningfully: “You would not only place me, but many of my friends who are deeply concerned in the outcome of the legislation, under lasting obligation to you, if you would support us in this endeavor to defeat a measure which, if it becomes law, will produce incalculable harm.”35 The “obligation” mentioned was, of course, a political one. This implied promise of the political support of Marshall and many of his fellow Jewish voters who were similarly “deeply concerned” with the “outcome of the legislation” who were now “under lasting obligation” to Governor Page—was the implicit quid pro quo for the Governor’s help in defeating the bill. Marshall also used the specter of the Jewish vote as leverage with public officials in his campaign for the passage of New York’s Civil Rights Act, which Jeffrey Gurock has analyzed in succinct detail.36 On May 23, 1907, at the behest of Marshall and other influential members of the New York Jewish community, State Senator Martin Saxe, a Republican representative of Manhattan’s West Side, submitted to the New York State Legislature “an act to amend chapter 1042 of the laws of 1895 . . . an act to protect all citizens in their civil and religious rights.” Formulated in response to growing anti-Jewish discrimination in hotels and country clubs throughout New York State, this amendment was designed to strengthen existing legislation by “prohibiting the advertising of discriminatory 34 Ibid. 35 Evyatar Friesel, “The Age of Optimism in American Judaism, 1900–1920,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram Wallace Korn (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1976), 137. 36 Jeffrey Gurock, “The 1913 New York State Civil Rights Act,” AJS Review 1 (1976): 93–120.

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or exclusionary practices in places of public accommodation and amusement.” In lobbying for passage of the Saxe Amendment, notes Gurock, Marshall and his associates “conducted what may be called a ‘textbook’ campaign in minority politics,” appealing to the political self-interest of Republican officials in Albany and presenting their struggle for passage of the civil rights legislation as an issue of “great importance” to the leading Jews of the state. Urging Governor Charles Evans Hughes to use his good offices to promote passage of the bill, Marshall warned Hughes and other Republican leaders that the 850,000 Jewish voters in New York State were seriously concerned and would resent further non-action.37 Marshall’s readiness to invoke the Jewish vote and use it as leverage in his negotiations with government officials was especially apparent in the campaign for abrogation of the Russo-American Commercial Treaty of 1832. Debate over the Jewish vote and Jewish electoral support for the Republican Party during the Roosevelt and Taft Administrations revolved in part around the issue of religious freedom for Russian Jews and for American Jews seeking passports to travel freely in tsarist Russia. The history of the political campaign to abrogate the 1832 US-Russian Commercial Treaty, and ensure the religious liberty of American Jews traveling abroad, led by Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, Mayer Sulzberger, and their colleagues between 1908 and 1912, has been thoroughly and critically analyzed by contemporary scholars.38 In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the tsarist government had begun to utilize clauses in this Russo-American Treaty, which guaranteed freedom of navigation and commerce as well as the free entry of residents of the signatory states, to subject American Jews visiting Russia to the same restrictions under which their Russian coreligionists lived. Despite repeated objections from the American government, the Russian regime remained adamant. It even suggested that the American government consider refusing passports to Jews intending to travel to Russia, “thereby sparing itself the embarrassment of having its citizens discriminated against by a ‘friendly’ foreign power.”39 To Marshall, Schiff, and the other leaders of American Jewry, US government acquiescence to such restrictions upon American Jews by a foreign 37 Ibid., 103. 38 See, for example, Naomi W. Cohen, “The Abrogation of the Russo-American Treaty of 1832,” Jewish Social Studies 35 ( January 1963): 3–41; and Gary Dean Best, To Free a People: American Jewish Leaders and the Jewish Problem in Eastern Europe, 1890–1914 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 166–205. 39 Abraham J. Karp, Haven and Home: A History of the Jews in America (New York: Schocken Books, 1985), 223.

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government relegated American Jews to second-class citizenship. During the presidential campaigns of 1904 and 1908, the issue of Russia’s refusal to recognize the rights of American Jewish passport holders had led Marshall, as Schiff, to wave the specter of the Jewish immigrant vote before Republican candidates Roosevelt and Taft. It was not unlikely, Roosevelt was reminded in 1904, that New York City’s Lower East Side vote could decide the state and possibly the national election.40 In 1908, the same message was conveyed to William Howard Taft. Working with Oscar Straus, Roosevelt’s secretary of labor and commerce, Marshall put pressure on presidential candidate Taft to secure Jewish electoral support by making an explicit statement on the passport question during the 1908 campaign. Moreover, when an editorial containing “slurring remarks” about Russian Jewry appeared in 1908 in the Cincinnati newspaper owned by Charles P. Taft, brother of the Republican nominee, Marshall “openly warned” that it would be most expedient not to provoke the million Jews of New York, most of whom were voters.41 Concerned lest his Democratic rival capture the Jewish vote by promises of recognition of American Jewish passports, Taft succumbed and in his campaign speeches committed the new administration to solve the Russian passport problem. Because President Taft had spoken out forcefully on the issue during the campaign and at his inaugural, a positive policy was expected. The new administration, however, to the chagrin of Marshall and his colleagues, chose a “prudent silence.”42 A meeting with Taft’s secretary of state, Philander C. Knox, in May 1910, convinced Marshall and other Jewish leaders that the administration, campaign promises notwithstanding, was unwilling to press Russia for revision of the Treaty of 1832. As a result, a more concerted and forceful campaign for the abrogation of the treaty was launched on January 19, 1911, with a keynote address delivered by Marshall at a convention of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. Marshall’s speech, as Naomi W. Cohen has noted, “set the pattern both in content and tone for the entire campaign” for abrogation of the 1832 Treaty with Russia.43 Reprinted in 35,000 copies and distributed to leaders of government, press, and pulpit, Marshall’s speech had immediate

40 41 42 43

Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 237. Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 57–58. Karp, Haven and Home, 224. Cohen, “The Abrogation of the Russo-American Treaty of 1832,” 6.

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repercussions.44 Taft invited Marshall, Schiff and other Jewish leaders to a conference at the White House. Marshall, warning that the Republican Party was likely to lose New York State if it failed to redeem its campaign pledges on this issue, looked forward determinedly to concrete action: “The time is past when sweet words will butter our parsnips,” he is reported to have warned.45 When Taft, however, reiterated his opposition to revision of the treaty, stating privately that “I am President of the whole United States, and the vote of the Jews, important as it is, cannot frighten me in this matter,”46 Marshall intensified the public campaign for abrogation of the treaty, and began pressing for adoption of abrogation resolutions in Congress. In addition to making personal appearances before the House and Senate Committees on Foreign Affairs, Marshall worked closely with Congressman William Sulzer who, through his position as Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was leading the Congressional fight for abrogation of the treaty. Finally, on December 13, 1911, the House of Representatives passed a joint resolution, introduced by Congressman Sulzer, instructing President Taft to notify Russia of the American intention to abrogate the treaty. The 300–1 congressional vote, orchestrated by Sulzer with the support of Marshall, demonstrated overwhelming national support for abrogation; at the instruction of Taft, Secretary of State Knox issued a notice of termination to the tsarist government. After the abrogation of the Russo-American Treaty of 1832, moreover, Marshall warned that if the Taft Administration negotiated a new treaty, which disregarded Jewish rights, “the Jews would be justified in voting as a man against the party which would be guilty of such an attack upon their citizenship.”47

Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the 1912 Election The public debate over the Jewish vote in the New York gubernatorial election of 1912, and over Louis Marshall’s oft-criticized role in trying to influence that vote, was related in part to political friendships formed, and political debts incurred, during the campaign to abrogate the US-Russian Commercial Treaty. The 1912 New York campaign between William Sulzer, the Democratic candidate,

44 45 46 47

Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 75. Ibid. Karp, Haven and Home, 225. Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 57.

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and Oscar S. Straus, the candidate of the Progressive Party, has long interested students of the Jewish vote and American Jewish political behavior.48 The 1912 election marked the coming-of-age of the East European Jewish vote in New York City. On the eve of the 1912 elections, as Moses Rischin has noted, the Yiddish press “was a political billboard.”49 All three parties heatedly contended for the support of the estimated 113,000 Jewish voters who comprised twenty-three percent of Manhattan’s electorate.50 The three-cornered race for the governorship of New York in 1912 allowed New York’s Jews to “pay tribute” to the country’s most distinguished Jew in public life, Oscar S. Straus, the former secretary of commerce and labor who was now the Progressive Party candidate. Some Jewish newspapers, to be sure, while initially praising Straus, “soon took to vilifying him as one who openly desecrated the Sabbath and the Day of Atonement” and as one who “aligned himself with the suspected Ethical Culture movement.”51 In the words of the Hebrew Standard, for example, Straus was “first an American and then a Jew.”52 Much of the Jewish press, however, especially within Manhattan’s Jewish Lower East Side, shared the view of the nationalist Yiddish daily, the Warheit, which hailed Straus as a truly great Jew, “a famous Jewish diplomat, scholar and communal worker,” and a symbol of the Jew’s right to high office. A Warheit write-in and Yiddish theater straw poll, notes Rischin, disclosed that nearly seventy-nine percent of Yiddish New York intended to vote for Straus.53 Despite Straus’s disapproval, moreover, the Progressive Party made electoral capital out of his Jewishness. Progressive journals “waxed eloquent” about how Straus’s candidacy contributed to the “destruction of religious and racial prejudice in this campaign,” and how “the Progressive movement is a development of the same aspirations for justice and human betterment that animated . . . 48 The 1912 gubernatorial campaign between Sulzer and Straus is analyzed in considerable detail in Naomi W. Cohen, A Dual Heritage: The Public Career of Oscar S. Straus (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 205–224. The issue of the “Jewish vote” in this election is also given special attention in Abram Lipsky, “The Jewish Vote in the Recent Election,” American Hebrew, November 21, 1913, 95; and idem, “Is There a ‘Jewish Vote’ in New York?,” American Hebrew, October 24, 1913, 707–708. 49 Rischin, The Promised City, 231. 50 Ibid. 51 Jonathan D. Sarna, “The Jewish Vote in Presidential Elections 1908–20, with Special Reference to Boston,” unpublished paper, Brandeis University, January 1973, 8. 52 Ibid. 53 Rischin, The Promised City, 232.

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the Hebrew prophets.”54 Progressive Party leaders called for statements or appearances by Straus to attract the Jewish vote, requests that Straus steadfastly turned down. Religion and politics were separate areas, he insisted, in reiterating his personal commitment to the principle of Jewish political neutrality, and he wanted no Jew to vote for him out of religious considerations alone.55 Straus’s Democratic opponent, William Sulzer, on the other hand, took the offensive in appealing for the Jewish vote. His work for the abrogation of the US-Russian Commercial Treaty, he told Jewish audiences, “had convicted the Czar in the court of public opinion”; by stopping persecution in tsarist Russia, he, Sulzer, had earned the praise of Russian Jewry and, presumably, the grateful votes of American Jews. Only two people hated William Sulzer, he reminded Jewish voters: the Tsar and Oscar Straus.56 Sulzer’s candidacy against Oscar Straus created perplexing problems for Jewish voters throughout New York. While ethnic and religious loyalty dictated a vote for Straus, the principle of Jewish political neutrality notwithstanding, Sulzer had been deservedly honored by the Jewish community for his successful Congressional leadership in the campaign to abrogate the US-Russian Commercial Treaty. In 1912, Louis Marshall was one of many New York Jews faced with the perplexing dilemma of who to support for governor, Sulzer or Straus. Marshall, as Schiff, resolved this dilemma by endorsing Sulzer, on the theory that it was more important to have a non-Jewish champion of Jewish rights and religious liberty in public office than a Jew. “A recurring theme in Marshall’s political life,” Morton Rosenstock has suggested, “was a partiality for gentile friends of the Jews.”57 This was, unquestionably, the case in 1912 in New York. To the surprise and consternation of many of Marshall’s friends, and many of Straus’s political supporters, Marshall wrote a public letter to a Yiddish newspaper endorsing Sulzer. Marshall’s unanticipated endorsement of Sulzer has long fascinated American Jewish historians, who have gone to great lengths to analyze and explain it. Marshall, to the distress and surprise of many, eschewed any pretense of political neutrality in the elections, and appealed to Jewish voters on Sulzer’s behalf. Marshall argued that Sulzer’s work for abrogation, especially since he was not Jewish, obligated Jews to support him. Marshall extolled 54 55 56 57

Ibid. Ibid. Cohen, A Dual Heritage, 220. Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 58. Marshall wrote a letter to the Yiddish newspaper Warheit endorsing Sulzer, October 18, 1912, MP-AJA.

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Sulzer as “clean and upright” and always on the side of the people, “a man who would not be bossed or controlled by anybody,” he told his Syracuse cousin.58 With much of the Yiddish press, and many of his colleagues at the American Jewish Committee, supporting Straus, Marshall was criticized by some “for not supporting one of his own who was so qualified.”59 He was in the unenviable and seemingly inconsistent position of defending Sulzer’s right to remind his Jewish constituents of his efforts on behalf of their cause in the abrogation campaign, and his right to solicit their votes on that basis. Marshall noted, in defense of his position, that Straus was doing the same thing in his appeal for Jewish votes.60 “Because a political party has seen fit to nominate a Jew for high office,” Marshall further maintained, the Jewish vote should not automatically be delivered to the Jew. Straus, in turn, based his appeal to Jewish voters on his political and labor record, and publicly attacked Marshall’s letter as an insult to the intelligence of the Jewish community. In lashing out against Marshall, he told his Jewish audiences that they did not need advice on how to vote from the “uptown” or “silkstocking” Jews such as Marshall. For a while, as Jerome Rosenthal has noted, “it seemed like Straus and Marshall were the two opposing candidates.”61 Marshall’s invective, in response to Straus’s attacks, was equally biting: “What a low, contemptible ignoramus and despicable demagogue your friend Oscar Straus is,” he wrote to his brother-in-law, Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, a few days before the 1912 election: I cannot imagine anything as offensive to decency and dignity as his attempt to create a feeling on the part of downtown Jews against the uptown Jews on the theory that they are silk-stocking millionaires and therefore have no right to express their views on political questions. . . . It would be the greatest misfortune if he should be elected.62

Such public and personal dissension between two preeminent Jewish leaders was almost unheard of in American Jewish life, and Marshall received some 58 Louis Marshall letter to Benjamin Stoz, October 3, 1912, MP-AJA; this letter is also quoted in Jerome C. Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall” (PhD thesis, University of Cinncinati, Cinncinati, 1983), 284. 59 Ibid., 276. 60 Marshall letter to Warheit, October 18, 1912, MP-AJA. 61 Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” 276. 62 Louis Marshall letter to Rabbi Judah L. Magnes, November 1, 1912, MP-AJA.

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criticism for deserting Straus in favor of Sulzer. Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, although a loyal follower of Woodrow Wilson, deplored the disservice to the Jewish community by Marshall and Schiff. Hoping to “lay the ghost” of a Jewish vote to rest, they had in fact invoked it, he correctly claimed.63 On Election Day, Straus ran second to Sulzer in New York City, but well behind both Sulzer and the Republican contender in the state.64 Surprisingly, also, the pro-Sulzer tactics of Marshall and Schiff had no “dramatic effect” on the electoral outcome. According to an analysis of the Jewish vote in New York City, in four out of five assembly districts where Jews predominated, Straus received a majority of the votes. Marshall’s appeals to Jewish voters on behalf of Sulzer seem, for the most part, to have gone unheeded. Torn between their admiration for and loyalty to their coreligionist, and their sense of political gratitude to a non-Jewish Congressman who had vocally espoused a controversial Jewish cause, the majority of Jewish voters chose the former over the latter. Although Marshall backed Sulzer for Governor of New York in 1912, one of the few instances in which he failed to support the nominee of the Republican Party, he was a strong and vocal supporter of William Howard Taft in the presidential campaign of that year. The first major Democratic inroad into the Jewish vote at the national level occurred in 1912 when Woodrow Wilson ran for the presidency for the first time. The Boston Jewish Advocate believed he deserved the support of American Jewry because “he has made culture the shining purpose of his life,”65 a sentiment shared by a significant number of American Jews. The influential American Israelite, which had been an early supporter of Taft, “switched course during the campaign,” attacking his stand on the Russian passport issue and finally praising the American people for their wisdom in electing Wilson.66 Much to the Republican Marshall’s surprise and chagrin, Jacob Schiff, Henry Morgenthau, Solomon Solis-Cohen, Cyrus Alder, Samuel Untermeyer, 63 “As a result of a continued emphasis upon the Jewish vote, such as one did not imagine could ever be in American life,” lamented Wise, “the nomination of [Straus] through no fault of his own, became a source of grief to every rightminded and truly earnest Jew.” Cohen, Encounter with Emancipation, 222. 64 Naomi W. Cohen has noted: “While the Progressive Party proved strongest in urban areas such as Manhattan, contemporary observers did not agree on the significance of the Jewish vote in the gubernatorial contest. The American Hebrew refused to read any religious or ethnic factors into the results, but a non-Jewish periodical, the Independent, maintained that Straus’ candidacy had evoked an anti-Jewish response.” Cohen, A Dual Heritage, 222. 65 Nathaniel Weyl, The Jew in American Politics (New Rochelle, NY and New York: Arlington House, 1968), 94. 66 Sarna, “The Jewish Vote in Presidential Elections 1908–20,” 9.

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and numerous other Jewish notables—many of whom had never before supported a Democrat—climbed upon the growing Wilson bandwagon.67 As the preeminent Jewish Republican in America, Marshall was especially distressed by his friend Schiff ’s non-support of the Republican Party and its presidential candidate. Concerned about the impact of Schiff ’s “startling action” in gentile Republican circles, he asked Schiff if it meant “that you have concluded to abandon the Republican Party entirely?” Defending Taft’s behavior on the Russian passport issue, Marshall insisted that the Republican Party “in my judgment represents the principle of constitutional government as we have received it from the Fathers of the Republic,” and as such still merited Jewish support. “It stands four square against the forces of socialism and radicalism,” he reminded Schiff. “It is the protagonist of law. . . . It stands for representative government as contrasted with an unregulated democracy.”68 Taft with all his faults, argued Marshall, would be better for the “protection of those principles which have made this country great, than Wilson.” Writing to Schiff on August 6, 1912, Marshall cautioned him that leaving the Republican Party “when its political fortunes were at a low ebb” would be misinterpreted in Republican circles and could cause Jews to be branded as “unreliable and political opportunists,” especially in view of the uniquely preeminent position Schiff occupied within American Jewry.69 Ignoring Marshall’s entreaties and apologetics for the Taft Administration’s unresponsiveness on the Russian Commercial Treaty issue, Schiff backed Wilson unequivocally in 1912, as he would do in the presidential race of 1916 as well.

Louis Marshall and the Supreme Court: The Appointment that Never Was Marshall’s steadfast support of the candidacy of William Howard Taft during the 1912 election is especially noteworthy in light of the fact that, two years earlier, Taft had refused to consider appointing Marshall to the United States Supreme Court, despite a serious lobbying effort on behalf of Marshall’s candidacy. The story of the campaign to promote Marshall’s candidacy for the Supreme Court vacancy in 1910 has never been fully explored and analyzed by American Jewish

67 Ibid. 68 Louis Marshall letter to Jacob Schiff, August 6, 1912, MP-AJA. 69 Ibid.

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historians or by students of the Supreme Court.70 As Lloyd P. Gartner has noted, “Marshall’s willingness to serve on the United States Supreme Court—and nowhere else—has been known,” but until recently, “not his active effort to get there.”71 Louis Marshall was never interested in holding political office. The only governmental post that he seriously aspired to, and the one for which he considered himself eminently qualified, was that of Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Marshall, fifty-four years of age in 1910, was one of the most distinguished and respected constitutional lawyers in America. A long-standing member of the New York Bar Association Judiciary Committee, Marshall was elected or appointed a delegate to three New York State Constitutional Conventions, in 1890, 1894, and 1915, a record unequaled in New York judicial history. So great was his stature in the legal community that in 1915 he received more votes than any other delegate to the Constitutional Convention, including Elihu Root.72 Marshall’s advice was frequently sought concerning nominations to the New York State and the federal judiciary, advice that he readily and regularly gave.73 Marshall also represented the Bar of the City of New York on the committee consisting of members of the legislature and also representatives of the New York County Lawyers Association and State Bar Association, and engaged for many years in revising the corporation laws of the state.74 His preeminent role in the revision of New York State’s corporation laws gave him “wide recognition” 70 Indeed, it is not even mentioned, no less discussed, in Jeffrey B. Morris, “The American Jewish Judge: An Appraisal on the Occasion of the Bicentennial,” Jewish Social Studies 38 (Summer–Fall 1976): 195–223; or in the standard history of appointments to the Supreme Court: Henry J. Abraham, Justices and Presidents: A Political History of Appointments to the Supreme Court, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). Marshall’s candidacy for the Supreme Court similarly goes unmentioned in the various biographies of William Howard Taft. See, for example, Henry F. Pringle, The Life and Times of William Howard Taft, 2 vols. (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1939); and Donald F. Anderson, William Howard Taft (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968). See also the definitive scholarly study of Taft’s role in Supreme Court appointments: Walter F. Murphy, “In His Own Image: Mr. Chief Justice Taft and Supreme Court Appointments,” Supreme Court Review (1961): 159–193. The Marshall candidacy is likewise unmentioned in the widely acclaimed Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Charles Evans Hughes, who received the appointment that Marshall sought: Merlo J. Pusey, Charles Evans Hughes, 2 vols. (New York: Macmillan Co., 1951). 71 Lloyd P. Gartner, “The Correspondence of Mayer Sulzberger and William Howard Taft,” Jubilee Volume of the American Academy of Jewish Research Proceedings 46–47 (1979–1980): 131. 72 Reznikoff, Selected Papers and Addresses, 2:1008. 73 Ibid. 74 Ibid., 1009.

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as an authority in the corporation law field and as a skilled legal draftsman.75 Moreover, as an influential Republican and staunch “Taft man,” and as a close associate of some of the highest-ranking New York Republican lawyers such as Charles Evans Hughes and Elihu Root, Marshall had good reason to believe that he had a chance to be seriously considered for a Supreme Court appointment.76 The opportunity for Marshall to try to realize his long-standing ambition came with the death of Justice David Brewer on March 28, 1910. In his single term as President, Taft appointed six Justices to the Supreme Court, including one Chief Justice—up to that time more than any other president since George Washington.77 Marshall’s close friends within the Republican Party, such as Mayer Sulzberger and Jacob Schiff, were apparently well aware of his aspirations to sit on the Supreme Court. They acted immediately when, “in a rare personal request for assistance,”78 Marshall asked them to speak to President Taft on behalf of his candidacy. Thus, on March 30, 1910, only two days after Justice Brewer’s death, Jacob Schiff wrote to Mayer Sulzberger: Our mutual friend, Mr. Louis Marshall, has been to see me today, to discuss with me the propriety of taking up his aspirations for the United States Supreme Court, in connection with the vacancy which has just occurred through the death of Judge Brewer. Mr. Marshall expressed the hope that you and I would go personally and see the President, in order to urge the nomination, and while between ourselves be it said, I do not think Mr. Marshall’s chances to secure the nomination are very great, but if you are willing to do what Mr. Marshall hopes we will, I am ready to go with you to see the President. In such case, would you be willing to write the President, asking for an appointment, telling perhaps of the purpose of which we seek this?79

The correspondence between Mayer Sulzberger and William Howard Taft, and between Sulzberger and Jacob Schiff, recently edited by Lloyd P. Gartner, throws some interesting new light on the effort to secure Marshall’s appointment. Upon receiving Schiff ’s letter concerning Marshall, Sulzberger immediately wrote to President Taft:

75 76 77 78 79

Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” 697. Ibid., 262. Abraham, Justices and Presidents, 164. Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” 262. Gartner, “The Correspondence of Mayer Sulzberger and William Howard Taft,” 130–131.

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Would you be inclined to favor Mr. Schiff and myself to the extent of receiving us on Thursday April 7th in order to give us an opportunity to advocate the appointment of Louis Marshall Esq. of New York as a Justice of the Supreme Court? When Justice Peckham died, I wrote you in favor of Mr. Marshall’s appointment and sent a full statement of his character, capacity and experience.80

Taft wrote back to Sulzberger on April 1, saying that “I shall be very glad to see you and Mr. Schiff on Thursday, April 7, at 12:00, in respect to the matter that you mention in your letter.”81 The result of the meeting, at which Colonel Isaac Ullman of New Haven, a leading Jewish Republican of Connecticut and close supporter of Taft, was also present, was disappointing. Taft is reported to have said, “Schiff, if you were President, would you name Sam Untermeyer’s partner to the Supreme Court?”82 While Taft’s statement angered Schiff, it made it abundantly clear to Schiff and the others advocating Marshall’s appointment at the White House that Marshall had no chance. It does not seem likely that Marshall’s partnership in the prestigious Untermeyer law firm, which he had joined upon moving to New York City in 1894, was the sole or primary cause of Taft’s refusal to seriously consider his nomination. To be sure, Untermeyer—an influential Democrat and civic reformer, who urged regulation of public utilities and who would later serve as counsel for the Pujo Committee, which enacted legislation establishing the Federal Trade Commission and other reform measures—was an ideological and partisan opponent of the president, who apparently disliked him intensely. While Marshall and Untermeyer do not seem to have been personally close or to have shared cases, the American public “‘was not expected’ to realize this or accept as proper that Untermeyer, who was then receiving immense fees for arranging the widely detested trust combinations, could have his partner on the nation’s highest court.”83 As Gartner has suggested, Schiff ’s skepticism over Marshall’s chances, conveyed in his letter to Sulzberger, probably came from knowing Taft’s antagonism to Untermeyer.84 80 81 82 83 84

Ibid., 131. Ibid., 131–132. Ibid., 132. Ibid. Ibid. According to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, who visited Taft in the White House in 1911 to promote the candidacy of Abram I. Elkus for appointment to the federal court, Taft detested

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The reasons for Taft’s non-appointment of Marshall, however, were probably more complex, a product of the immense political considerations underlying the judicial appointment process. Indeed, apparently, Taft had already promised Justice Brewer’s seat to Governor Charles Evans Hughes of New York, who accepted Taft’s nomination later that month. Taft had compelling political reasons to appoint Hughes over Marshall. Hughes was, in 1910, a youthful and vigorous forty-eight-year-old and “a bright new star in the Republican constellation,”85 who already had his eyes on the presidency. Taft had feared him as a potential rival in 1908; now he frankly regarded Hughes as “clear Presidential timber—stronger, indeed, than himself or Teddy Roosevelt.”86 When he learned that Hughes “seemed prepared, indeed eager” to leave the political scene, Taft quickly wrote to him, offering him Justice Brewer’s seat. Taft apparently had Hughes’s acceptance “in his pocket” prior to his White House meeting with Sulzberger, Ullman, and Schiff.87 There is no question that Taft, with his eyes on his 1912 reelection campaign, felt that he had far more to gain politically from appointing Hughes than from appointing Marshall. Taft undoubtedly felt reasonably sure that the Jewish voters who had supported him overwhelmingly in 1908 would support him in 1912 as well. While Taft certainly lost significant Jewish support by his vacillation on the Russian passport issue, it is unlikely that he lost comparable Jewish electoral support by his decision not to appoint the first Jew to the Supreme Court.88 It might also be argued that if Taft had wanted to appoint a Jew to the Supreme Court in order to attract the Jewish vote, it would have been Mayer Sulzberger rather than Louis Marshall. A pillar of the Republican Party in Philadelphia, Sulzberger enjoyed the personal respect of Taft, who wrote that he was “proud to claim” Sulzberger as a friend.89 More significant, perhaps, Sulzberger possessed an important qualification for the appointment that Marshall lacked—prior judicial service. When Taft entered the White House in 1909, Sulzberger had served with great distinction

85 86 87 88

89

Untermeyer personally, in addition to opposing him politically and ideologically. Stephen S. Wise, Challenging Years (New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 145–146. Abraham, Justices and Presidents, 166. Ibid. Wise, Challenging Years, 145–146; and Gartner, “The Correspondence of Mayer Sulzberger and William Howard Taft,” 132. Jacob Schiff ’s subsequent decision, for example, to abandon the Republican Party and support Woodrow Wilson rather than Taft in the 1912 election, had primarily to do with his disillusionment with Taft over his vacillation on the Russian passport issue and the abrogation. Gartner, “The Correspondence of Mayer Sulzberger and William Howard Taft,” 139.

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for fourteen years on the Court of Common Pleas, Philadelphia’s principal judicial tribunal, the last seven of those years as President Judge.90 Such arguments notwithstanding, it seems unlikely that Taft ever considered Sulzberger or Marshall for any of the five appointments he made to the Court during his tenure as President. As Lloyd Gartner has noted, the story that Taft offered a seat on the Supreme Court to Sulzberger, “who politely declined on account of his age and desire to pursue Jewish scholarship,” seems unfounded.91 Taft’s decision was, of course, a personal disappointment to Marshall, whose one serious ambition for political office was thereby frustrated. It was, moreover, a disappointment for many within the Jewish community who would have been especially gratified by the nomination of Marshall as the first American Jew to serve on the Supreme Court. Only one other Jew, Judah P. Benjamin, had ever previously been offered a position on the Supreme Court. However, when President Millard Fillmore had offered Senator-elect Benjamin the Court post in 1852, Benjamin had declined the nomination, preferring to go to the Senate.92 Marshall’s appointment to the Supreme Court would have, undoubtedly, evoked the same pride amongst American Jews that had been evoked with the appointment of Oscar Straus as secretary of commerce and labor in 1906. Marshall, even more than Straus, occupied a unique position in American Jewish public life as one of American Jewry’s most respected and constructive leaders. Thus, one Jewish paper could write that “the report that the name of Mr. Marshall has been presented to the President for appointment to the Supreme Court as the successor of the late Justice Brewer . . . has been received with great satisfaction by a majority of the Jews of America.” It is no exaggeration to say that if Mr. Marshall should be appointed to this office, our Jewish population would view the appointment with more interest than any that has hitherto been made. We do not wish to

90 For a discussion of Sulzberger’s achievements as a judge, see Morris, “The American Jewish Judge: An Appraisal on the Occasion of the Bicentennial,” 203–204; and Louis E. Levinthal, Mayer Sulzberger, P.J. (Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1927). Biographical material on Sulzberger generally can be found in Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963), 362–365. 91 Gartner, “The Correspondence of Mayer Sulzberger and William Howard Taft,” 130. 92 On Judah P. Benjamin, see B. J. Hendrick, Statesmen of the Lost Cause (New York: Little, Brown, 1943); Bertram W. Korn, “Judah P. Benjamin as a Jew,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society 38 (1965): 153–171; G. G. Vest, “Judah P. Benjamin: A Senator of Two Republics,” The Menorah (November 1903); Charles A. Madison, Eminent American Jews: 1776 to the Present (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1970), 42–56.

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say a single word against the Jews, who have in the past been designated to high positions in this country, but we wish to say that none among them is as popular among all classes of Jews as Mr. Marshall, and that none of them stood as high as he stands in Jewish public opinion. Of all Jewish public men from “uptown,” or among those who are referred to as German Jews, Mr. Marshall stands nearer to the East Side than any of them, and the virtue of Mr. Marshall in this regard is, that he has sought in all of his communal labors to pass beyond the boundaries of his class and to approach the Jewish Masses and to understand them. Mr. Louis Marshall is not to be considered one of the ordinary Jewish leaders. He has a broader view and a deeper feeling than they have. In his case communal work is not charity as a business. In a certain sense he must be considered America. While we do not agree in all matters with Mr. Marshall, still we have never doubted in his uprightness, in his zeal, in his earnest wish to stand nearer to the people as far as it is possible to do so, and we say that his communal work has succeeded more than that of any other Jew in America. The elevation of such a man to a high office would be the source of the greatest satisfaction to the Jews of this country.93

Throughout his seventeen-year tenure as President of the American Jewish Committee (1912–1929), Louis Marshall remained the most influential and respected Jewish Republican communal leader in America, whose counsel at election time was solicited by Republican Party leaders and Jewish voters alike. “Probably Marshall’s chief political role,” as one of his biographers has suggested, “was instructor and advisor to Jewish voters in national presidential campaigns, especially during the 1920s.”94 In the postwar campaign of 1920, Marshall initially endorsed Herbert Hoover for the Republican nomination, praising him as “a sound man of affairs” with “transcendent ability.” After Harding’s nomination, however, Marshall switched his support and soon was on excellent terms with him. When Harding died, Marshall, “speaking for the Jews of America,” as the New York Times put it, eulogized the late President in glowing words.95 The 1924 election, from the vantage point of Jewish voters, was notable because of the Ku Klux Klan issue. Marshall strongly believed that the best approach for the Republican Party on the Klan “was to ignore it,” and he therefore opposed efforts by some Jewish Republicans to insert an anti-Klan plank into

93 “Mr. Marshall as a Public Man,” Box 1619, Louis Marshall Papers, MP-AJA. 94 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 58. 95 New York Times, August 6, 1923, 2.

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the party’s platform.96 Despite his differences with the Republican Party leadership over their handling of the Klan issue, however, Marshall remained a staunch and vocal supporter of the Republican nominee, Calvin Coolidge—thus being one of the few German-Jewish leaders to actively campaign for the Republican ticket in 1924—and publicly condemned a circular issued by the Hebrew American League of New Jersey calling on Jews to vote for Davis because of Coolidge’s less than forthright stand vis-à-vis the Klan.97 Marshall’s consistent support of Coolidge, in spite of the latter’s non-committal attitude on the Klan, may have caused a certain diminution in his influence within Jewish circles for, as Marshall contemptuously noted, there were “a large number of pin-heads” who now regarded him as more of a Republican than a Jew.98 Such criticism of Marshall was attributable to the fact that the Jewish Republicanism that he had championed and that had characterized so much of American Jewry during the first two decades of the century was beginning, gradually, to diminish. The last years of Marshall’s leadership in American Jewish public life represented a transition during which his forthright Republicanism became increasingly unacceptable to the majority of Jews of East European descent who were reaching voting age.99 In 1922, more Jewish Democrats than Republicans were elected to Congress for the first time since the Civil War. Despite the election of Coolidge in 1924, moreover, three new Jewish Democrats—Emmanuel Cellar, Sol Bloom, and Samuel Dickstein—were sent to Congress from New York City. As Lawrence H. Fuchs has correctly suggested, the election of Cellar and Bloom from two Jewish congressional districts that had heretofore been Republican “was another sign that the Republican hold over the Jewish population was swaying.”100 During the 1920s, especially in New York after the rise of Al Smith, a growing number of Jewish voters tended to favor the Democratic Party and its candidates.101 This was even true amongst Marshall’s colleagues at the American Jewish Committee, and within the German-Jewish leadership circles from which they were drawn, a group that had once been predominantly Republican: Marshall’s two immediate successors to the presidency of the American Jewish Committee, Cyrus Adler and Judge Joseph Proskauer, were both staunch 96 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 59. 97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., 60. 99 Ibid., 63. 100 Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 64. 101 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 63.

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Democrats rather than Republicans. During the presidential election campaign of 1928, Proskauer, Adler, Herbert and Irving Lehman, Henry Morgenthau Jr. and Nathan Straus, among several others, would all support Smith over Herbert Hoover. Indeed, Proskauer, one of Smith’s closest personal friends and political confidants, would serve as Smith’s campaign manager during the 1928 election.102

Marshall, the Republican Party, and the Jewish Vote: The 1928 Election During the presidential campaign of 1928, an election during which few prominent Jewish communal leaders supported the Republican ticket, Marshall gave “complete and warm” support to the Republican presidential candidate, Herbert Hoover. As his 1928 correspondence with the Republican National Committee indicates,103 Marshall contributed $3,000 to the Republican Lawyers Committee for Hoover’s campaign and, alone among the Jewish communal leadership, served as a member of the Executive Committee of the National Hoover-Curtis Lawyers Campaign Association. Throughout the 1928 campaign, there were strong indications that a growing number of Jewish voters, following the advice of Jewish leaders such as Herbert Lehman, Judge Joseph Proskauer, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, were ready to abandon the Republican Party in favor of the Democratic nominee, Al Smith. Recognizing, moreover, that many Jewish voters might be influenced in favor of the Democratic nominee, as a reaction to the strong prejudice against Smith’s Catholicism, Marshall tried to repudiate allegations of Republican bigotry and to eliminate the religious issue from the campaign. Speaking to large Jewish audiences in Boston, Brooklyn, and elsewhere, Marshall praised Hoover’s humanitarian job of administering war relief activities after World War I, during which Hoover had displayed “supreme indifference to religion,” and the subsequent record he had achieved as secretary of commerce.104 Marshall was also ready to speak to Jewish voters of the help he had received from Hoover, when Marshall had served as the President of the Committee of

102 The definitive biography of Proskauer is Louis M. Hacker and Mark D. Hirsch, Proskauer: His Life and Times (Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1978). 103 See, for example, the letters on Republican National Committee stationery from Willaim W. Hoppin, vice chairman of the Republican Lawyers Committee of the Republican National Committee, to Marshall, of September 29, 1928 and October 15, 1928, MP-AJA. 104 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 61.

6. Louis Marshall, the Jewish Vote, and the Republican Party

Jewish Delegations at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919. The Republican National Committee, moreover, responded favorably to suggestions that Marshall publish a statement concerning “Mr. Hoover’s interest in the Jewish people and . . . the assistance rendered by him to Mr. Marshall and others” during the framing of the Peace Treaty, with its recognition of Jewish minority rights, at Versailles.105 Such a statement, it was suggested to the Chairman of the Republican National Committee, “if it were given publicity,” would be “a great benefit” in Hoover’s campaign for Jewish votes.106 Marshall’s role during the 1928 campaign was especially controversial. When Marshall spoke on behalf of Hoover at Republican rallies, and accepted the honorary vice chairmanship of a major Hoover public meeting at Madison Square Garden on October 13,107 he was “severely criticized” by some leading Jewish Democrats for misusing his leadership position within the Jewish community, by helping the Republican Party to appeal to the Jewish vote. One Anglo-Jewish newspaper, the Chicago Chronicle, admonished Marshall for acting hypocritically because “he had always opposed the participation of Jews in politics,” and concluded that “every man has his price—even the greatest.”108 A New York Jewish attorney asked Marshall whether, in endorsing Hoover, he had acted as an individual, or wished the public “to believe that he was speaking for American Jewry.” When Marshall replied that the question was “insulting, impudent and stupid,” the lawyer instituted a libel suit which was subsequently withdrawn.109 Another source of criticism concerning Marshall’s work on behalf of the Republican ticket centered on an invitation Marshall received to address a “nonsectarian meeting,” under the most partisan auspices of the Maryland State Republican Committee, in Baltimore. The Republican Speakers’ Bureau noted that Marshall’s presence at the election-eve meeting on November 4 was especially desired “because of the effect among the Jewish people.”110 In thanking Marshall, “on behalf of my colleagues” at the Republican National Committee, 105 William Rubin letter to Dr. Hubert Work, Chairman of the Republican National Committee, September 7, 1928, MP-AJA. 106 Ibid. 107 Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” 503; on the Republican National Committee’s invitation to Marshall to serve as an honorary vice chairman at the Madison Square Garden Rally, at which Elihu Root served as chairman, see the September 29, 1928 letter from James G. Harbord to Marshall, MP-AJA. 108 Rosenthal, “The Public Life of Louis Marshall,” 504. 109 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 61. 110 John Q. Tilson letter to Louis Marshall, October 20, 1928, MP-AJA.

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Maurice Bisgyar assured Marshall the next day that “as you know Maryland is considered a doubtful state, and if anything will turn the tide in our favor it ought to be the last minute appeal that you made in behalf of Mr. Herbert Hoover.”111 This appeal, Marshall’s critics justly claimed, was directed primarily towards Jewish voters. A distinguished Baltimore Jewish leader protested that invitations to the public meeting had been sent only to Jews and that the “manifest purpose” of Marshall’s visit was “to use his prestige to influence Jewish voters in a political campaign,”112 a blatant violation of the doctrine of political neutrality to which Marshall purported to subscribe. Marshall was deeply offended by this criticism and replied that he had “always deplored the Jewish vote,” claiming that he “had never spoken on a political issue to a specifically Jewish audience, or used arguments directly aimed at Jews.” Nonetheless, he argued, he had the right to express his opinions, “and Jews, like others, had the right to listen.”113

Conclusion Throughout much of his public career, Louis Marshall found himself in paradoxical and, at times, uncomfortable positions. As one of the best-known and most articulate proponents of the concept of Jewish political neutrality in America, he was at the same time one of the pillars of the Republican Party and one of its most vocal and partisan supporters. Politics and religion, Marshall steadfastly maintained, were separate areas. In theory, at least, Marshall continuously opposed the idea of a Jewish vote and the assumption that a Jewish candidate automatically was entitled to the support of Jewish voters. (Hence, his support for William Sulzer over Oscar Straus in 1912.) Time and again he reiterated, as did other Jewish leaders of his era that in the polling booths Jews had to decide only who would do the best job for the country. Throughout his public career, Marshall denied the legitimacy of appeals to Jewish voters being predicated upon religious considerations, sharing the view of Rabbi David Philipson that the very idea of a Jewish vote was both un-Jewish and un-American.114 In his lip service to the doctrine of Jewish political neutrality, Marshall was consistent and unwavering. In 1927, Marshall tried to discourage a group of young men from 111 Maurice Bisgyer letter to Louis Marshall, November 5, 1928, MP-AJA. 112 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 61. 113 Ibid., 61–62. 114 Henry L. Feingold, Zion in America: The Jewish Experience from Colonial Times to the Present (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 212.

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forming a political club to advance the interests of “Jewish young men who are deserving of recognition,” a trend that he had voiced public opposition to for a quarter of a century. “You are playing with fire and with edged tools when you announce this as the ultimate purpose of your organization,” he warned. “This idea of getting political recognition because one is a Jew is, to me, unspeakably shameful.”115 In 1928, Marshall could say to Democratic Congressman Emanuel Celler: “Nobody has objected more strenuously and consistently than I have to the recognition of a Jewish vote, for there is none. I am happy to say that Jews have always exhibited independence in politics.”116 Such rhetoric notwithstanding, Marshall’s commitment to the ideal of Jewish political neutrality was much greater in theory than in practice. As Morton Rosenstock has noted, whether or not Marshall “deliberately” manipulated a Jewish vote, he “nevertheless used Jewish voting as leverage in dealing with governmental authorities” throughout his public career.117 Closely identified with the Republican Party and its leadership, Marshall seems to have had a much closer working relationship with the Republican National Committee than almost any other Jewish communal leader of his generation. Although Marshall only occasionally called upon American Jews to vote as Jews, he constantly reminded his fellow Jews how much the Republican Party had done for the Jewish people. The concept of Jewish political neutrality also presupposed, at least in theory, a policy of non-interference in the political appointments of Jews to public office. Indeed, it can be argued that an assumption that the Jewishness of a public figure should be completely irrelevant to his consideration for appointive, as well as elective, office was central to the conception of Jewish political neutrality that Marshall continuously espoused. Indeed, one might have assumed that Marshall’s espousal of the ideal of Jewish political neutrality within American politics would have led him to reject efforts to influence the appointments of Jews to political and governmental office; one might have imagined that such a posture would have led him to reject, unequivocally, Jewish efforts to lobby for his own appointment to high judicial office. Yet in this area also, Marshall’s adherence to the doctrine of Jewish political neutrality was more in theory than in practice. On more than one occasion, Marshall was ready to eschew any pre115 Quoted in Deborah Dash Moore, At Home In America: Second-Generation New York Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981), 212. 116 Ibid. 117 Ibid.

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tense to such political “neutrality” when potential Jewish appointments to high governmental office were at stake. Nor was he ready to remain neutral when the appointment was his own. Marshall’s claim, in the aftermath of the 1928 election, that he “had never spoken on a political issue to a specifically Jewish audience, or used arguments directly aimed at Jews,” cannot be supported by the available historical evidence. His decision to publish a Yiddish newspaper on the Lower East Side, as we have noted, was predicated upon his desire for a Yiddish forum to support the Republican Party and the anti-Tammany reform forces associated with it, and to appeal to “a specifically Jewish audience”—the Jewish working-class constituency of the Lower East Side—on behalf of Republican issues and candidates. Despite Marshall’s well-known pronouncements about Jewish voting, the Jewish World “took the typical politician’s approach to the Jewish voter,” appealing to Jewish voters specifically on behalf of the candidacies of fellow Jews. Thus, as Lucy Dawidowicz has noted, for example, the paper’s editorials in Yiddish and English urged the support of Judge Alfred Steckler, the Republican candidate for the New York State Supreme Court, because “he was a Jew, because Jews were entitled to their ‘pro quota share’ of officials and because the Republican party was sympathetic to this Jewish claim, while the Democratic party failed to recognize it.”118 On more than one occasion, moreover, Marshall did indeed utilize political arguments at election time, directly aimed at Jews. Thus, for example, on the eve of the 1916 election, Marshall based his appeal to the Jewish voters of New York City’s Twentieth Congressional District, on behalf of Congressman Isaac Siegel, on the latter’s opposition to literacy tests for immigrants, an issue that interested Jewish voters as Jews. Marshall’s own “great satisfaction to endorse his candidacy, whole-heartedly and unreservedly,” as he advised Jewish voters of the Twentieth Congressional District, had to do with Siegel’s leadership in the Congressional opposition to this “restrictive legislation,” with which the Jewish community, as an organized community, was so vitally concerned.119 Marshall instructed his fellow Jewish voters at election time in other ways as well. In 1919, for example, Marshall sent a form letter to Jewish voters in New York, written on reverse sides in English and Yiddish, urging the election of “my partner, Mr. Irvin Untermeyer, who was running for State Supreme Court 118 Dawidowicz, “Louis Marshall’s Yiddish Newspaper,” 120. 119 Louis Marshall letter to the electors of the Twentieth Congressional District, November 2, 1916, MP-AJA.

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Justice!”120 Despite his well-known preoccupation with deploring the Jewish vote and denying its existence, Marshall consistently instructed Jewish voters on how to vote, whether or not they required his instruction. Stephen Wise’s ironic critique of Marshall’s partisanship during the Sulzer-Straus gubernatorial campaign of 1912 might well be applied to much of Marshall’s public career: Hoping to once and for all “lay the ghost” of a Jewish vote to rest, he in fact did much to invoke it.

120 Rosenstock, Louis Marshall, 58.

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The Legacy of Julius Rosenwald* Around the turn of the twentieth century, a handful of Jews, mostly of German origin, came to exercise a profound influence on American philanthropy, creating a multiplicity of charitable institutions that continue to shape our world. It was an impressive group, including in its ranks the banker Jacob Schiff, the financier Felix Warburg, the industrialists Daniel and Simon Guggenheim, the merchant Nathan Straus, and the jurists Julian Mack and Mayer Sulzberger. But its foremost member was surely Julius Rosenwald. Though Rosenwald inhabited a world much different from our own, his rise from rag trade to riches, and the uses to which he put his enormous wealth, constitute a story that bears retelling. Julius Rosenwald was born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois, where his parents had settled and opened a clothing store after emigrating from Germany eight years earlier. At age seventeen, with only two years of high school behind him, the young man left home to work in his uncles’ wholesale clothing business in New York. He soon saved enough money to open a store of his own and then a business manufacturing men’s summer clothing. In 1885 he moved the factory to Chicago. There, after a decade of successful toil, Rosenwald made a fateful investment, purchasing a twenty-five-percent stake in the company of one of his local customers, a small mail-order house by the name of Sears, Roebuck, and Company. By the close of 1896, Rosenwald had become a Sears vice president, and he was to remain at the company for the rest of his career, rising in 1908 to become its president. He made significant contributions to every aspect of the Sears operation, introducing new technologies like conveyor belts and gravity chutes to accelerate the processing of orders, tightening quality controls, and launching ________________________________________________________________ * “The Legacy of Julius Rosenwald” was published originally as “What Julius Rosenwald Knew” in the April 1998 issue of Commentary. Reprinted with permission of Commentary magazine.

7. The Legacy of Julius Rosenwal

an innovative advertising campaign—“your money back if not satisfied”—that had tremendous popular appeal. By 1906, when Sears moved into a vast new facility in Chicago, it was recording an average of 20,000 orders a day, a number that rose to 100,000 during the Christmas season. At the end of the first decade of the century, the firm’s annual gross sales tallied more than $50 million, making it the largest mail-order company in the world. By 1925, Rosenwald’s personal holdings in the company had risen from $37,500 to a then-prodigious $150 million. If Julius Rosenwald’s accomplishments at Sears showed him to be a true pioneer of modern business—Henry Ford is said to have borrowed the assembly line technique from the great retailer—he was also a trailblazer in the field of philanthropy, devoting as much energy to giving away his wealth as he had to acquiring it. Like the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, his contemporary, Rosenwald saw himself as a public servant, the temporary steward of treasure entrusted to him for the purpose of bettering the world. To this end, Rosenwald gave without stint to a wide range of institutions. The University of Chicago and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry received millions from his purse, as did numerous Jewish organizations like the American Jewish Committee, the Joint Distribution Committee, the Jewish Theological Seminary, and a host of Chicago-based associations, societies, and synagogues. Increasingly, however, even as he continued donating to established organizations, Rosenwald developed certain convictions about philanthropy that impelled him down a rather unconventional path. His ideas came from different sources. He was deeply influenced, first of all, by Emil Hirsch, one of the leading Jewish communal leaders of the day. The rabbi of Chicago’s Sinai Congregation, a Reform synagogue on whose board Rosenwald himself served, Hirsch placed great weight on a principle deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition of giving: the importance of encouraging self-help. Although, for Hirsch, charity should be motivated by compassion for the poor and the need to alleviate immediate distress, it was always better to help people become gainfully employed than to give them alms. In a man of Rosenwald’s political outlook, this view was warmly received. Like most of the other German-Jewish communal leaders of his time, Rosenwald was a staunch Republican and an equally staunch adherent of the laissezfaire business philosophy for which the party stood. An unabashed admirer of the solid conservatism of William Howard Taft, and one of his most loyal supporters within the Jewish community, Rosenwald contributed generously to the campaigns of every Republican presidential candidate of his era. He was an

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especially ardent backer of his friend Herbert Hoover, contributing $50,000 to Hoover’s 1928 presidential campaign and becoming a close adviser and confidant during his presidency. Rosenwald’s friendship with Hoover began through an involvement with the massive charitable campaign that provided assistance to civilian victims of World War I, an effort that Hoover spearheaded. (Rosenwald’s special cause was the American Jewish Relief Committee for War Sufferers, through which he became the single largest American contributor helping Jewish casualties of the war in Eastern Europe.) Both men came away from the experience convinced that with proper leadership, the resources of private philanthropic institutions could be summoned to meet any domestic crisis, no matter how grave. The alternative, then as now, was to offer the poor a right to governmental support. But this, Rosenwald maintained, had drawbacks that would lead to permanent dependence and a cycle of ever deeper poverty. Moreover, to give without requiring something in return was simply to invite the recipient to come back asking for twice as much. Convinced as he was of the truth of this argument, Rosenwald—in contrast to many other Jewish leaders of his day— became a vociferous opponent of the proposals advanced by Franklin D. Roosevelt, then campaigning for the presidency, to rescue the country from the Great Depression. Since he died in January 1932, ten months before Roosevelt’s election, Rosenwald would not see the results of those policies once Roosevelt had a chance to put them into effect. Rosenwald’s opposition to government-provided welfare, however, did not mean he thought nothing should be done to help the downtrodden. On the contrary, from his embrace of self-reliance there flowed, early and late, a whole raft of philanthropic projects. He became a generous backer, for instance, of Hebrew Free Loan Societies, charitable institutions that furnished small amounts of capital, interest-free, to impoverished Jews. And Rosenwald’s reach was by no means confined to the Jewish world. He was a bountiful supporter of a campaign to establish more Young Men’s Christian Associations in urban Black neighborhoods; the YMCA was then a major provider of temporary lodging and meals, and a source of employment information, to the poor and homeless across the land. While the YMCA campaign was an important component of Rosenwald’s charitable portfolio, the realm in which he left his most enduring philanthropic imprint was the education of American Blacks. Rosenwald’s interest in this area was first encouraged by Rabbi Hirsch, but its greatest spark came from Paul J. Sachs, a former partner in the New York investment-banking firm of Goldman

7. The Legacy of Julius Rosenwal

and Sachs, and himself a noted philanthropist. In 1910, Sachs gave Rosenwald a copy of Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, Up from Slavery; as Rosenwald would frequently note, this work influenced him more profoundly than almost any other book he had read. Born into slavery in 1856, Washington had become by the 1880s a nationally known and respected educator whose gradualist approach to racial equality had won him wide acceptance and respect. He was also, of course, much criticized, in particular by the Black leader W. E. B. Du Bois, who favored forcing more immediate and far-reaching changes in the legal, economic, and social condition of American Blacks. Whoever had the stronger argument in this debate over means and ends, Washington could at least lay claim to genuine attainments for many newly emancipated slaves. The school he established in 1881 in Tuskegee, Alabama, had rapidly become a national center for agricultural and vocational training, and a laboratory for the formulation of self-development programs. Among other approaches, Washington urged “Blacks to emulate” was the “very bright and striking example” set by American Jews. As he wrote in his 1902 book, The Future of the American Negro: There is, perhaps, no race that has suffered so much [as the Jews]. . . . But these people have clung together. They have a certain . . . unity, pride, and love of race; and, as the years go on, they will be more . . . influential in this country—a country where they were once despised. . . . Unless the Negro learns more and more to imitate the Jews in this matter, to have faith in himself, he cannot expect to have any high degree of success.

This was a message that, not surprisingly, held a special appeal for a Jewish philanthropist like Rosenwald. The two men first met in 1911 when Washington came to Chicago to raise money for the Tuskegee Institute. Shortly thereafter, Rosenwald was invited to serve as a trustee. But his support for Tuskegee was not confined to mere checkbook philanthropy. Like Washington himself, Rosenwald firmly believed that charity alone would never ameliorate Black poverty; rather, Blacks needed to develop the skills that would make them indispensable employees, thereby offering a path from grinding poverty into the middle class. In furtherance of this philosophy, he became intimately involved in the workings of Tuskegee, making annual pilgrimages to Alabama in a private railroad car and bringing along a sizable contingent of relatives, friends, and potential benefactors. On these visits, where Rosenwald’s party would typically be greeted with torchlight processions, brass bands, and elaborate ceremonies, he and his guests

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were given a chance to attend classes and observe students demonstrating their newly acquired skills. Rosenwald was in the habit of awarding cash bonuses on the spot to outstanding faculty members. Back home, he arranged for Sears to offer the students steeply discounted rates on surplus or slightly damaged shoes and hats. From involvement with the Tuskegee Institute, Rosenwald moved on to finance a far more ambitious enterprise conceived by Washington: the building of public schools for Blacks. In 1912, when this project was launched, educational opportunities for Blacks in the rural South were severely limited, to say the least. In Alabama, a state where half the population was Black, only twenty percent of Black children were enrolled in school, as compared with sixty percent of White children. And the facilities that did exist tended to be staffed by grossly underpaid teachers working in appalling conditions. Rosenwald began by launching a fundraising drive that employed the thennovel mechanism of matching funds (to be supplied in labor, materials, or cash). The idea was that, by this means, recipients would regard the school-building program not as charity handed to them from on high but as an enterprise in which they themselves were integral partners. The campaign was a huge success. Poor Blacks across the South pledged cows and calves and sold eggs, hens, corn, cotton, berries, and other produce to generate funds; children donated their pennies. In one rural village, farmers set aside the proceeds from an entire section of a cotton field (the “Rosenwald Patch”); in another town, where a former slave donated his life savings of $38, the impoverished residents of the community succeeded in collecting a total of $1,365 and in building a new school that served hundreds of students. In short, by asking the beneficiary communities themselves to contribute, Rosenwald stimulated local philanthropy and investment alike. In 1916, pleased with the progress of his Southern School Building Program, Rosenwald agreed to pay a third of the cost of several hundred additional schools. Between 1917 and the time of his death in 1932, through direct grants and indirect fundraising, he could claim credit for the construction of 5,357 public schools serving more than 600,000 Black children throughout the South. Of what relevance today is the example of Julius Rosenwald’s life and philanthropic accomplishments? To some, that relevance must seem questionable. Although an astute executive and generous giver, Rosenwald, they would say, was, like his friend Herbert Hoover, shortsighted about the good that an active government could do. At a moment when America was grappling with economic calamity, Rosenwald, whose uncritical faith in Hoover never faltered, stood

7. The Legacy of Julius Rosenwal

foursquare against changes that were salutary in their time and that have since become almost universally accepted in our national life. Moreover, the critique would continue, Rosenwald’s approach to race relations was undeniably patronizing—think of those defective shoes and hats. But that is hardly the end of the matter. For in a real sense Rosenwald was not shortsighted at all, but rather a farseeing visionary. The programs of the New Deal may indeed have helped millions of Americans move from temporary joblessness to gainful reemployment—which is all they were intended to do—but as these programs evolved over the decades, they led to the very demoralization and dependency among the poorest of the poor that Rosenwald had warned against. By contrast, the inculcation of habits of individual responsibility and self-help—the essence of Rosenwald’s philosophy—is today seen by many, even in the Black community, as the only way out of a seemingly endless cycle of despair. As for Rosenwald’s supposed condescension toward the objects of his concern, the fact remains that his school-building program and all his other activities in behalf of American Blacks left a tangible legacy of significant and lasting worth. Can one say the same for the standing acrimony over affirmative action and Black antisemitism that today passes for interracial “dialogue”? In the end one is left with a tantalizing and paradoxical proposition: it is no accident, but rather the expression of a large and ironic historical truth, that a man of Rosenwald’s particular political and philanthropic views should have understood so much and acted in so genuinely beneficial and progressive a way. Relevant in its day, his example is even more relevant in our own.

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Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions* Introduction For close to fifty years, Cyrus Adler was one of American Jewry’s most influential communal leaders and public servants. Taking part in the founding of the Jewish Publication Society (1888), on whose various committees he would serve as chairman throughout his life, Adler was a founder of the American Jewish Historical Society (1892), and its president for more than twenty years. Together with Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, Oscar Straus, Felix Warburg, and his cousin, Judge Mayer Sulzberger, Adler played an instrumental role in organizing the American Jewish Committee (1906) and served as its president from 1929 until his death in 1940. During his thirty-two years (1908–1940) as president and chief administrative officer of the Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Adler shaped the institution into one of the preeminent institutions of higher Jewish learning in America. When Solomon Schechter died in 1915, Adler succeeded him to the presidency of the Jewish Theological Seminary, with which he had been closely associated since its founding in 1886, while remaining president of Dropsie as well. Serving as president of the seminary for twentyfive years, Adler played a central role in the founding of the United Synagogue, whose presidency he also held. As such, it can be said without exaggeration that Adler was one of the most influential leaders and important personalities in the Conservative movement. ________________________________________________________________ *

“Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions” was published in the Spring 1985 issue of the AJS Review. Reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.

8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions

During his distinguished public career, which spanned half a century, the one Jewish public cause in which Adler did not take a leadership role was that of Zionism. As Simcha Kling has so aptly noted, “whenever the relationship between Conservative Judaism and Zionism is discussed, it is always pointed out that the latter has been an integral part of the former since its inception and even before . . . except for Cyrus Adler.”1 Adler’s non-Zionism was a product of a number of factors, one of which was certainly his unique environment and upbringing. Unlike so many Jewish leaders of his generation, Adler’s roots were not in Eastern Europe, but rather in the American South. Born in Van Buren, Arkansas, in 1863, while the Civil War still raged, Adler would throughout his public career be, first and foremost, a proud and patriotic American, for whom the specter of dual loyalty would always be anathema. For Adler, who revered and studied Thomas Jefferson as he did the ancient rabbis,2 and who spent close to twenty years as an official of the US government, the political Zionism formulated by Theodor Herzl at the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897 posed the potential threat of “strings” to his allegiance as an American citizen, to which he would always be sensitive. Adler’s non-Zionism was, as we shall suggest, predicated upon his vigorous opposition to Herzlian political Zionism, which envisioned the creation of a Jewish state, and the renaissance of Jewish self-government, in Palestine. While recognizing that Palestine held a unique historical and religious significance for world Jewry, Adler felt that to affirm the creation of a separate Jewish state and nationality would endanger the rights secured by Jews in America and throughout the emancipated world, and create a problem of dual loyalty. A fundamental difference between Zionists and non-Zionists such as Adler centered on the question of “whether the Jews need a separate State to survive or not; whether the place of the Jews in the spiritual unfolding of mankind is the whole world or delimited to Palestine as a distinct political entity.”3 Adler and other 1 2

3

Simcha Kling, “Cyrus Adler and Zionism,” Conservative Judaism (Fall 1979): 22. Adler’s reputation as a Jefferson scholar was given recognition when he was invited by the Thomas Jefferson Association of the United States to contribute a study on Jefferson to the memorial edition of Jefferson’s works then being published under its auspices in 1904. His contribution, “Jefferson as a Man of Science,” has been republished in Cyrus Adler, Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses (Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1933). See also Adler’s interesting paper, “The Jefferson Bible,” which constituted his introduction to Jefferson’s The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904); This essay is also republished in Adler’s Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses. Richard Keith Harkavy, “Non-Zionism within Reform Judaism: 1917–1948” (Rabbinical School thesis, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, 1984), 21.

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non-Zionists in the years prior to World War I considered large-scale Jewish immigration to Palestine—a central objective of the Zionist program—politically futile as long as the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine. While they did not regard mass Jewish immigration to Palestine as practical or even desirable during this (pre-1917) period, they did appreciate the urgency of having a haven for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe. Therefore, as we shall discuss in some detail in this study, Adler and other non-Zionist leaders were actively involved in investigating Jewish immigration and colonization possibilities in other lands. After World War I, non-Zionists such as Adler recognized that, with the defeat of the Ottoman Turks and the beginnings of the British Mandate, a part of the Jewish people could migrate to Palestine, but they maintained that the majority of Jews would stay in America and other countries wherein they enjoyed equal civil and religious rights.4 And yet, in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration, as we shall suggest in this study, Adler became increasingly receptive to the nonpolitical aspects of the Zionist program, and to cooperation between the Zionist movement and non-Zionist leaders like himself. Adler was a non-Zionist rather than an antiZionist, in that he supported the Balfour Declaration, which “viewed with favour” the establishment of a Jewish “home” or homeland in Palestine, rather than the Herzlian objective of a politically secured Jewish state. For non-Zionist leaders, “Palestine was to be ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ national home, a cultural and social but never a political structure.”5 This distinction between a Jewish home for those who wished it and the politically sovereign state of the Jewish people was a crucial one for defining the parameters of, and differences between, nonZionism and anti-Zionism. Non-Zionists such as Adler were committed to the Balfour Declaration and its nonpolitical ramifications, and were ready to support Zionist work in Palestine without sharing its political aims, a commitment that anti-Zionists were never ready to make. In contrast, the anti-Zionists, from whom Adler would carefully disassociate himself, rejected the Balfour Declaration outright, and stubbornly refused to cooperate with both Zionists and non­ Zionists in their shared nonpolitical endeavors for the expansion of the Jewish Agency, and for the building and development of Palestine, during the 1920s. Stuart E. Knee’s definition of non-Zionism as opposition to a Jewish state but not to “Jewish immigration to Palestine, or [to] the revival there of religio-

4 5

Ibid., 22. Ibid.

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cultural Judaism”6 would accurately characterize the position of Cyrus Adler after 1917. While remaining opposed to the reestablishment of Jewish political sovereignty in Palestine, Adler, as a non-Zionist, was ready to cooperate with those within the Zionist movement who sought “to establish in Palestine a center for Judaism, for the stimulation of our faith, for the pursuit and development of literature, science and art in a Jewish environment, and for the rehabilitation of the land.”7 Thus, as we shall note, Adler and his non-Zionist colleagues were not only ready to cooperate with the Zionist leadership in fostering the economic development of Palestine, but were increasingly ready to actively cooperate in promoting the growth and development of agricultural, scientific, charitable, and educational institutions in Palestine. In their willingness to work closely together with the Zionist movement for the rehabilitation of Palestine, it can be argued, the non-Zionists were much closer to the Zionist leadership than to its virulently anti-Zionist opponents. Adler had long viewed Palestine as the spiritual center, or home, of world Jewry. He and other non-Zionists favored the creation of a Jewish cultural center in Palestine, at least in part, because “they were concerned with the cultural and spiritual predicament of American Jews facing assimilation.”8 In this respect, as more than one scholar has suggested, Adler was influenced by the cultural Zionism of Ahad Ha-Am, whose conception of Palestine as a spiritual (rather than political) center that would sustain and revitalize Diaspora Jewry fit the non-Zionists’ perception of American Jewry’s needs. Non-Zionism, for Adler, was predicated in part upon the belief that Jewish spiritual and cultural creativity and survival were possible in Palestine as well as in the American Diaspora, an assumption that the anti-Zionist leadership of American Reform Judaism were (prior to the mid-1930s) unwilling to accept. Anti-Zionists, as Richard K. Harkavy has noted, refused to even acknowledge the possibility that a Jewish cultural center in Palestine might benefit American Jewry. To do so, they believed, “would be an admittance that Jewish life in the diaspora was a failure.”9 Non-Zionists like Adler, however, as Harkavy has so aptly put it, differed from the leadership of the Zionist movement in that they envisioned 6 7 8 9

Stuart E. Knee, “Jewish Non-Zionism in America and Palestine Commitment, 1917–1941,” Jewish Social Studies 39 (Summer 1977): 209. Abraham A Neuman, Cyrus Adler: A Biographical Sketch (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1942), 205. Harkavy, “Non-Zionism within Reform Judaism,” 162. Ibid., 23.

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a Jewish cultural center in Palestine as “enriching Jewish life everywhere but not replacing it.”10 Adler’s steadfast non-Zionism was undoubtedly shaped in part by the German-Jewish world in which he was raised and lived. For Cyrus Adler, who was on his mother’s side a Sulzberger, had been born into one of the leading families of American Jewry’s German-Jewish upper class. Moving to Philadelphia from Arkansas after his father’s death, Cyrus Adler grew up comfortably in the rarefied world of the German-Jewish aristocracy of which his uncle David Sulzberger and his cousin, the prominent Philadelphia jurist and Jewish communal leader Mayer Sulzberger, were so much a part. The attitudes and prejudices of this Jewish world of wealth and privilege, so far separated from the very different world and culture of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant masses, whom Adler never really identified with or understood, were shared by Adler throughout his career in Jewish public life. Adler was a pivotal and unique member of the “Our Crowd” German­Jewish leadership group, comprising such influential Jewish figures as Schiff, Marshall, Mayer and Cyrus Sulzberger, Oscar and Nathan Straus, Harry and Herbert Friedenwald, Daniel Guggenheim, and Judah L. Magnes, to name but a few, who organized the American Jewish Committee and who would exercise a profound and far-reaching influence on the direction and reorganization of American Jewish communal life from the end of the nineteenth century through the first three decades of the twentieth. In the eyes of many East European Jews, especially those identifying with the Zionist movement, Adler and his “uptown” colleagues of the American Jewish Committee represented the personification of shtadlanut and non­Zionism in American Jewish public life. And yet, Adler was in many respects a unique, as well as a representative, figure within this German-Jewish leadership group. Adler’s success as one of the preeminent Jewish public servants of his era lay in his unique ability to bridge worlds that early in the twentieth century had little common ground. A religiously observant Jew, knowledgeable in the field of Jewish scholarship, he was also well known and respected in the world of American government and scholarship. To cite but one example, his discovery, while an officer of the American Philosophical Society, of the so­called Jefferson Bible created a scholarly sensation even before its publication, with an introduction by Adler, in 1904,11 10 Ibid., 162. 11 For a discussion of Adler’s discovery and purchase of the Jefferson manuscript, the “fervor it created in religious circles,” and its publication, see Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 95–99. This is also

8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions

at the express authorization of Congress. Having achieved a distinguished record of twenty years of governmental service in Washington, DC, during which time, as assistant secretary of the Smithsonian National Museum, he held one of the highest appointive political offices ever occupied by a Jew in the United States, Adler enjoyed the respect and “ear” of senators and presidents in each administration from Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt. A tireless communal leader and a creative and constructive administrator, Adler was uniquely able to interpret the needs of the traditional-minded Jews to the men of wealth and influence in American Jewry. Indeed, even those who disagreed with Adler over a number of issues, Zionism included, never questioned his devotion to Judaism nor denied that his views should be given the most serious consideration. And yet, his aloofness from Zionism and steadfast opposition to the democratization of American Jewish public life limited his relations with those to whom he was closest in his observance of Judaism. Almost alone among the leaders of the Conservative movement of his generation, Adler refused to identify with the cause of political Zionism or to join the ranks of the Zionist movement. Adler remained, to the amazement of many, a committed non-Zionist, a true lover of Zion who remained continuously distrustful of the Zionist movement. The ambivalent and seemingly paradoxical nature of Cyrus Adler’s relationship to Zionism has not, with the singular exception of an uncritical and alltoo-brief essay by Simcha Kling,12 been the subject of serious scholarly study and analysis. Such a critical study, I believe, is long overdue. Ira Robinson’s excellent new edition of Adler’s correspondence has provided us with much new material relevant to a critical study of the subject.13 It is my hope that the following examination of Adler’s complex attitudes and relationship to Zionism will contribute, in some small way, to a better understanding and appreciation of what is perhaps the most puzzling and inexplicable chapter in the public life of one of twentieth-century American Jewry’s most significant communal servants.

discussed in Adler’s autobiography, I Have Considered the Days (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1941), 58–59. 12 Kling, “Cyrus Adler and Zionism,” 22–27. 13 Ira Robinson, ed., Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985).

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The Beginnings of Non-Zionism: Adler, Herzl, and the Mesopotamian Plan Upon convening the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Theodor Herzl and his fellow leaders of the emerging Zionist movement had announced their objective “to secure for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally secured home in Palestine.” The Basel program generated heated public debate and controversy within the American Jewish leadership circles of which Adler was a part. Looking, as always, at the “practical” aspects of the problem, Adler was doubtful whether Palestine with its limited resources could indeed solve the Jewish refugee problem or whether Jewish immigration into Palestine would even be allowed by the Turks. Adler recommended an alternative haven for the persecuted Jews of Eastern Europe: Syria and Mesopotamia. Adler had been considering such a “non-Zionist” scheme for the colonization of Mesopotamia since the early 1890s, when he had first visited the Near East on a special assignment for the United States government. In 1887, following the completion of his PhD in Semitics at Johns Hopkins, Adler had been appointed curator of the Department of Oriental Antiquities at the Smithsonian National Museum. In 1888, as an official of the National Museum and representative of the United States government, Adler had arranged an exhibit on biblical archaeology and Palestinian objects at the Centennial Exposition of the Ohio Valley, which was followed soon thereafter by a series of exhibitions that he arranged for the United States government in Atlanta, Chicago, and St. Louis. When it was proposed to celebrate the four-hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America with an International Exposition in Chicago in 1892, President Benjamin Harrison appointed Adler special commissioner of the Columbian Exposition. In this capacity, Adler traveled to Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, Syria (and later to Palestine), to secure exhibits and to present the official invitations to the countries and secure their active participation. His travels as special commissioner were a “striking success.” In each of the countries he visited, great interest was developed in the Columbian Exposition. Governments, as well as manufacturers and merchants, “were induced to subscribe the necessary funds” to assure the representation of their native industries and cultural enterprises at the exposition.14 The presidential appointment as commissioner was, moreover, a “singular distinction” for Adler, who, as a young government official, was just embarking on the first chapter of a distinguished 14 Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 34.

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public career in Washington, during which time he would earn a national reputation based on the extraordinary talent for administration, creative planning, and practical statesmanship that would later serve him in such good stead during his years as president of Dropsie College and the Jewish Theological Seminary. Equally important, as Louis Finkelstein has recently pointed out, wherever Adler went on his fifteen-month journey throughout the Near East, “he sought out the Jewish community and its leaders, discovering the sufferings under which so many Jews lived.”15 During the seven months he spent in Constantinople, Adler became friendly with the grand vizier, Kiamil Pasha, and had the opportunity to discuss with him “the part that Turkey might play in the solution of the Jewish problem.”16 More conscious than ever of the oppression of the Jews of Russia and of their need for a refuge, Adler sought permission from Kiamil Pasha and the Turkish government to allow mass Jewish immigration to Palestine. Kiamil Pasha argued that Syria and Mesopotamia would be more “practical” havens for the Jews of Europe, an apparently convincing argument that Adler soon began to espouse. In 1892, Professor Paul Haupt, the eminent Assyriologist of Johns Hopkins University and Adler’s dissertation adviser and close friend, published a pamphlet advocating the same “Mesopotamian plan” for the resettlement and colonization of Russian Jews.17 At Adler’s suggestion Haupt, who had earlier studied Mesopotamia as a region for possible German colonization at the request of Bismarck, met with Oscar Straus and Mayer Sulzberger, who shared Adler’s interest in the plan. The Mesopotamia scheme, conceived several years prior to the first Zionist Congress in 1897 and later referred to as the “Cyrus Adler plan” by Theodor Herzl,18 was predicated upon the non-Zionist assumption that “the best region for the settlement of the Russian Jews . . . undoubtedly” was Mesopotamia and Syria rather than Palestine. Adler’s dedication to this plan, which led to his rift with Herzl, helps to explain, in some measure, his nonsupport for the first Zionist Congress’s Basel Program and for the early goals of political Zionism. It is more than a little surprising that in his autobiography Adler does not record the fact that in 1896, after “consultation with Mayer Sulzberger and 15 Louis Finkelstein, preface to Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:v. 16 Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 36. 17 For a detailed discussion and analysis of Haupt’s “Mesopotamian plan,” see Moshe Perlmann, “Paul Haupt and the Mesopotamian Project, 1892–1914,” Proceedings of the American Jewish Historical Society 38 ( January 1958): 154–175. 18 Ibid., 164.

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Oscar Straus,” he initiated correspondence with Herzl, wherein he outlined his program for the settlement of East European Jewry in Mesopotamia and Syria rather than in Palestine. Nor does Adler discuss, in either of his two published books, the relevant fact that he enclosed copies of Haupt’s pamphlet with his letter to Herzl, and that, much to his chagrin, Herzl failed to respond to his letter for more than two years. Adler’s letter to Herzl is worth quoting in its entirety. Recognizing the fact that more than half of the Jews of the world are now living in countries in which they are regarded as aliens and subjected to the most degrading political, social and economic restrictions, I have become convinced that in the next century a series of very considerable migrations will be rendered necessary. Various organizations are now engaged in colonization in Palestine and Argentina and these I think should be advised to proceed along the lines they have hitherto followed. I do not think that a large percentage of immigration to Palestine should now be encouraged as I feel sure that the country is not able to absorb people rapidly, and besides it would probably raise such opposition on the part of orthodox Christians as to bring about expulsion of such as are already settled there. Judging from what I have heard you have larger plans in mind and I accordingly invite your attention to two countries in Western Asia— Mesopotamia and Syria—both of which in my opinion should be seriously considered. I take the liberty of sending under separate cover several copies of a plan for colonization in Mesopotamia which was carefully worked out some years ago. I have reason to think that you may find agencies among prominent persons in Paris which would assist in colonization in Syria. When in Beirut some years ago, I met with a gentleman who had acquired large tracts of land as an agent for persons in Paris with the view of Jewish settlement. Mesopotamia offers the greatest facilities. Besides it has more than once been the home of the children of Israel, where they acquired the discipline and rehabilitation which enabled them to reconstruct their nationality. Both religious sentiment and Biblical precedent would favor the repetition of this plan. There are practicable reasons for it rather than a settlement in Palestine which would encounter opposition at the start and prevent colonization from strengthening itself sufficiently to acquire power and permanency to build up and maintain itself. A large part of the lands belong to the Turkish Crown and could be purchased directly from the Sultan. It would be to his interest to have a strong, thrifty and aggressive population settled there. A sine qua non in the case of all persons settling in any part of the Ottoman Dominions

8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions

should be their willingness to give up their previous subjection or citizenship. In making these suggestions I wish you would understand that I am speaking only for myself and for a few of my friends, some, I may add, of distinguished political and diplomatic experience a conference with whom suggested this communication. My letter should not be construed as implying anything more than it explicitly says. I would say however that there is no official Jewish opinion in this country, as you probably know, although a number of rabbis more particularly of Reformed congregations have condemned your proposed conference in advance. But such opposition or disapproval, I would characterize as being rather individual opinions than in any sense representative either of the Jews in this country of much influence who would be glad to see some extensive plan of colonization in the east established and they are not without hope that eventually an independent state might grow up. All of this should be left to the slow operation of time but it may well be aided by intelligent and statesmanlike action. Should the Conference see fit to entertain the notion of colonizing either in Syria or Mesopotamia I should be glad to know of it and I may be able to put you in the way of some useful suggestions. I have no desire to appear in this matter and you can if you wish make any of these suggestions on your own initiative. On the other hand I have not the slightest objection to the use of my name. I am living in the country of my birth, am sincerely attached to it, and feel neither the desire nor need to change it. But I cannot forget the fact that more than half of the men of my faith and blood are being subjected to a daily mental torture which in the end will have results more horrible than death. That they should leave the countries in which they are persecuted becomes a necessity. That they should turn to the East is natural. That their brethren in more favored lands should guide and assist them is but a duty. That they may have many hardships I can well believe. But it is better to perish in a noble struggle than to live a life of servitude. If you and your confreres can form a plan which will realize this end then those who now call you visionaries and dreamers will learn that it is of such that leaders are born. My hope is that the wisdom of your body will be equal to its singleness of purpose—that you will do all things slowly—and that no matter what discouragements come in your path you will be strong and of good courage.19

19 Cyrus Adler letter to Theodor Herzl, undated draft, c. 1897, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:73–75.

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Herzl may, as Abraham A. Neuman has speculated,20 have been too much preoccupied with the preparations for the first Zionist Congress and “too little informed” about American Jewry and its leadership to take seriously the communication of an “unknown” correspondent; nor, probably, did “he recognize the potential diplomatic and financial resources which American Jewish leaders such as Adler, Sulzberger, Straus, and their associates might have lent in support of the emerging movement for political Zionism.” Whatever the explanation, Adler never received an acknowledgment of this letter to Herzl. It was not until two years later, toward the end of 1899, that he did get a message from Herzl, forwarded by Professor Richard Gottheil of Columbia University, the first president of the Federation or American Zionists. By this time, however, Adler had already become unequivocally opposed to the political Zionism that Herzl and his colleagues at Basie espoused. Thus, in response to Herzl’s belated correspondence, Adler wrote the following cold reply: Before the first Congress at Basie, I took the liberty of forwarding a copy of the same document to you together with a memorandum on the subject, of which I also send you a copy. I am bound to say in all frankness to you, therefore, that since the various Congresses have met and the Zionist programme has been formulated, my judgement has led me away from believing in the success of the plans thus far announced. I consider a “publicly, legally guaranteed home” for the Jews in the Ottoman Empire an impossibility and I further believe that any guarantee given would be valueless.21

These letters are obviously of historical import. Strangely ignored by many historians of American Zionism, the Adler-Herzl letters are significant historical documents for analyzing and illuminating the emerging non­Zionist opposition of Cyrus Adler, Mayer Sulzberger, Oscar Straus, and their circle to the political Zionism of Herzl. The fact that Adler did not refer to them in either of his two principal books—especially in his autobiography, I Have Considered the Days—has both fascinated and perplexed scholars who have previously sought to analyze Adler’s public career and evolving attitudes toward Zionism. Not the least interesting aspect of these letters, as Herbert Parzen has noted, is “that they contain the full arsenal of arguments” employed by non-Zionists and Zionists 20 Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 194–195. 21 Cyrus Adler letter to Theodor Herzl, undated draft ( January 1900), in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:83–84.

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alike, including the non-Zionist slogan of Jewish colonization anywhere but not in Palestine.22 Adler, moreover, was a prolific correspondent who was not used to having his advice and counsel go unheeded. He was understandably “miffed” by Herzl’s failure to even acknowledge his letter, a fact that may have helped shape his emerging opposition to the leadership and tactics of the Zionist movement. The intervening years between Adler’s first and second communications with Herzl, whom Adler would never meet, had created a wide and seemingly unbridgeable chasm between Herzl and the American non­Zionist leadership that Adler, Sulzberger, and Straus represented. His second letter to Herzl marks the beginning of Adler’s public opposition to the kind of political Zionism that Herzl envisioned. It is in this response to Herzl’s letter that Adler made a clean break with political Zionism, citing the practical objections to the fulfillment of the Zionist program that he had come to share with other prominent non-Zionist leaders of the American Jewish community. Indeed, Adler’s letter to Herzl may well be considered the first public articulation of the emerging American Jewish non-Zionist position, for which Adler would remain one of the most unrelenting spokesmen for the next twenty-five years. It can legitimately be argued that Herzl made a serious tactical error in ignoring the first Adler letter and the advice that had been forwarded by Adler, Sulzberger, and Straus. In so doing, he alienated, perhaps inadvertently, the most politically influential leadership group within American Jewry, which, by 1899, had become increasingly inimical to political Zionism. For while, as Adler admitted to Herzl, he was only speaking for himself and “for a few of my friends,” it was indeed a group with “distinguished political and diplomatic experience,” not to mention political clout, for whom he spoke. Oscar Straus, who was (from 1898 to 1900) serving his second stint as United States minister to Turkey, and would, in 1906, become the first American Jew appointed to a cabinet post, enjoyed easy entry into government circles and the “ear” of the president and his administration. And Sulzberger, who had been elected to the Philadelphia Court of Common Pleas on the Republican ticket, was, together with his friend and political confidant Louis Marshall, one of the pillars of the Republican party at the very time that the leadership of the nascent Zionist movement was beginning to seek political support within high circles in Washington and London in order to further the Zionist program and objectives. During a period in which 22 Herbert Parzen, Architects of Conservative Judaism (New York: Jonathan David, 1964), 92–93.

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the Republican party was in power in the United States, their active support for, and participation in, the Zionist movement would have been invaluable. Of all the lands proposed for Jewish settlement during the decade following the first Zionist Congress in 1897, Mesopotamia most intrigued the American Jewish leadership group of which Adler, Sulzberger, and Straus were a part. Strategically situated between Africa and Asia, historically the birthplace of Abraham, Mesopotamia was repeatedly noted as a desirable alternative to Palestine by the non-Zionist leadership in the United States. Adler, Straus, Sulzberger, and Jacob Schiff continued to advocate the “Cyrus Adler plan” for the Jewish colonization of Mesopotamia for several years following Adler’s second letter to Theodor Herzl. In 1903, when Turkey granted a concession permitting the extension of the Berlin-to­Baghdad railway down to the Persian Gulf, Adler and Straus recognized the implications the railway would have in world politics and the implications it could have for Jewish settlement. Straus and Adler alerted Jacob Schiff to the possibility of opening up Mesopotamia for colonization in conjunction with the railway, especially if Jewish bankers participated in financing the project. Since Schiff ’s friend, the British financier Sir Ernest Cassel, was also interested in the railroad, Schiff subsequently sent him information on the Haupt-Adler scheme.23 As late as 1909, as Naomi W. Cohen has noted, Adler, Schiff, and other members of the Executive of the American Jewish Committee met with Straus just prior to his departure for Constantinople, where he was to begin his third tour of duty as American ambassador, to discuss the details of a Mesopotamian settlement.24 By that time, however, in the aftermath of the Turkish Revolution of 1908, “realities mitigated against success.” The new Turkish government, under the influence of the nationalistic policies of the newly entrenched Young Turks, increasingly discouraged Jewish immigration to all parts of the Ottoman Empire.

Conservative Judaism and Zionism: The Position of Cyrus Adler When his close friend Solomon Schechter joined the ranks of the Zionist movement in 1906, Cyrus Adler alone among the leadership of the Conserva23 Naomi W. Cohen, A Dual Heritage: The Public Career of Oscar S. Straus (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1969), 139. 24 Idem, Not Free to Desist: The American Jewish Committee, 1906–1966 (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), 106.

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tive movement remained inimical to the Zionist cause. From its earliest days, even before it had become a distinct movement, the leadership of Conservative Judaism had “wholeheartedly embraced the Zionist idea.”25 As Moshe Davis has pointed out, Zionism was “an integral part of the program of thought and action,” which the Historical School developed in the closing years of the last century and which it “transmitted” to the Conservative movement.26 With Herzl’s call for the first Zionist Congress in 1897, most members of the Historical School participated actively in Zionist affairs. Marcus Jastrow, for example, took “a very deep interest” in the Zionist movement and was elected vice president of the Federation of American Zionists.27 Benjamin Szold’s active participation in Zionist societies is, as Moshe Davis notes, documented in the American Hebrew press of the 1890s.28 The first intercollegiate Zionist society, the Young American Zionists, was organized in 1896 by seminary students with the help of undergraduates of the City College of New York.29 The identification of Conservative Judaism with Zionism became even more pronounced in the Jewish Theological Seminary under the leadership of Solomon Schechter (1902–1915), although, it should be noted, Schechter did not support Herzl and the Zionist cause immediately. Indeed, upon his arrival in America in 1902, Schechter had gone so far as to state that “Zionism divorced from the religious idea is a menace.” However, Schechter could not long resist the “cherished dream of Zionism,” although he recognized that “the dream was not without its nightmares.”30 In an essay explaining his decision to join the Federation of American Zionists in 1906, he wrote: “To me, personally, after long hesitation and careful watching Zionism recommended itself to me as the great bulwark against assimilation. . . . Zionism . . . is the Declaration of Jewish Independence from all kinds of slavery whether material or spiritual.”31 Many 25 Simcha Kling, “Zionism in the Early Days of Conservative Judaism,” in Perspectives on Jews and Judaism: Essays in Honor of Wolfe Kelman, ed. A. Chiel (New York: Rabbinical Assembly, 1978), 257. 26 Moshe Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1963), 268. 27 Ibid., 271, for Jastrow’s published views on Zionism, see Marcus Jastrow, “Zionism and its Critics,” Maccabean 11 (October 1901): 23–28. 28 Davis, The Emergence of Conservative Judaism, 271–272. 29 Herbert Parzen, “Conservative Judaism and Zionism, 1896–1922,” Jewish Social Studies 23 (October 1961): 237. 30 Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 199. 31 Kling, “Zionism in the Early Days,” 263.

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years later Louis Lipsky would comment: “It was Dr. Schechter . . . who made the Jewish Theological Seminary an institution for the graduation not only of Rabbis, but also of Zionists. Without exception, its Rabbis . . . have carried the message of Zionism to all parts of America.”32 Indeed, a study of seminary alumni indicates that in 1914, the last year of Schechter’s presidency, over sixty percent of the graduates of the seminary’s rabbinical school were active and selfdeclared Zionists.33 The leading members of the seminary faculty brought in by Schechter—Louis Ginzberg, Israel Friedlaender, Israel Davidson, and Mordecai M. Kaplan—were all Zionists.34 Indeed, with the encouragement of Schechter, Professors Friedlaender and Kaplan became the “chief proponents” of Ahad HaAm’s cultural Zionism, which they adapted to the American scene.35 It was, perhaps, Professor Louis Ginzberg who most succinctly enunciated the prevailing attitude toward Zionism of most of his colleagues on the seminary faculty and within the Conservative rabbinate, when he said: “Jewish nationalism without religion would be a tree without fruit, Jewish religion without Jewish nationalism would be a tree without roots.”36 With the death of Solomon Schechter in 1915, Cyrus Adler became acting president of the seminary and president of the United Synagogue. As such, as we noted earlier, he was the acknowledged leader of the Conservative movement. He was at the same time, however, the only leader of Conservative Judaism to remain outside the ranks of the Zionist movement. On the issue of Zionism, Adler found himself in the paradoxical situation of being on the side of Reform, “on the side of the religious party that had repudiated the religious tenets which he strove to maintain all his life.”37 On the other hand, his own colleagues in the institutions of the Conservative movement were to be found in “the ranks of the Zionist party” to which he was strenuously opposed. His continued and vocal antipathy to political Zionism through the 32 Louis Lipsky, “Early Days of American Zionism,” Palestine Yearbook 2 (1946): 451. 33 Parzen, “Conservative Judaism and Zionism,” 239. 34 As Baila Shargel has noted, however, “of all the Seminary faculty, it was Friedlaender who devoted the greatest portion of his time and creative energy both to the theoretical defense of the Zionist ideology and the day-by-day, year-by-year functioning of American Zionism.” Baila Round Shargel, “Israel Friedlaender and the Transformation of European Thought in America” (DHL diss., Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, 1982), 280. For a detailed discussion and analysis of Friedlaender’s role in, and contributions to, American Zionism, see ibid., 280–316. 35 Kling, “Zionism in the Early Days,” 267. 36 Louis Ginzberg, United Synagogue Reports, 1913–19 (New York: n.p., 1920), 21. 37 Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 199.

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mid-1920s remained, for many within the Conservative movement, an inexplicable contradiction, which they were unable to empathize with or understand. The extent of Adler’s antipathy to political Zionism, and the friction that it generated within the Conservative movement, can be gauged by his role in a bitter controversy that shook the fifth annual convention of the United Synagogue of America, of which Adler was then president, in July 1917. Convened just four months prior to the issuance of the Balfour Declaration, at a time in which favorable Jewish public opinion was crucial for generating official political support in Washington on behalf of the declaration, the convention proposed the following resolution: “Be it resolved that the United Synagogue of America joins with the Zionists throughout the world in voicing the claim to a legally recognized and internationally secured homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine.” Although an amendment to the resolution was immediately proposed substituting “Jews” for “Zionists,” Adler stringently protested. I strongly object to this resolution, which I think is against the constitution of the United Synagogue. The constitution of the United Synagogue on the subject of Palestine has one phrase—to preserve in the service the reference to Israel’s past and the hopes for Israel’s restoration. That is the agreement on that point that we reached when the United Synagogue was organized. I stand here representing a congregation which has never authorized me to vote in favor of the Basel programme. I shall not vote for it; I shall not be bound by it. This is a matter of principle and conscience which no vote can force upon a man. I shall not discuss the Zionist programme here. I may discuss it at some future time, when I consider it wise and pertinent to discuss it. But I submit that this is not the place nor is it proper that by a vote of this body I shall be put in a position of assenting to something to which I do not now assent.38

A second controversial issue debated at the United Synagogue convention, involving representation at the sessions of the American Jewish Congress, led to Adler’s resignation as president of the United Synagogue. As part of the struggle for control of Jewish organizational life, the creation of a congress had, of course, been a source of tension between the American Jewish Committee, of which the United Synagogue was an affiliate, and the leadership of the American Zionist movement. By the summer of 1917, Adler remained a bitter foe of the congress, while Louis Marshall and other prominent members of the American Jewish Committee had, in the spirit of communal compromise, come to accept 38 Quoted in Parzen, Architects of Conservative Judaism, 121.

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the idea of the congress as a fact of Jewish organizational life. Indeed, at the annual meeting of the American Jewish Committee in November 1915, a resolution had been passed whereby Marshall and a majority of the leadership of the committee had decided to abandon their opposition and “switch over to the Congress movement.” When this resolution was passed, Adler had “denounced the Congress movement as fraudulent” and declined to have his name considered for reelection as a member of the AJC’s executive committee.39 The United Synagogue’s decision was one with which Adler could not concur. Hence, when it was proposed by the delegates to the United Synagogue “that the Convention proceed to the election of a delegate to the American Jewish Congress,” Adler immediately announced his opposition with the threat that he would resign his office if the resolution were approved: “I rise to say that I am entirely opposed to that resolution or to the election of a delegate to the Congress from this body, and that I will not associate myself with such a resolution if it is carried. I desire to announce here that in no circumstances will I feel bound in any way by the act of that Congress.”40 Despite Adler’s dissent, the resolution was resoundingly passed. Professor Israel Friedlaender was elected as the delegate to the congress, and Adler adamantly refused to accept reelection to the presidency of the United Synagogue. Moreover, when the first meeting of the pro-Zionist American Jewish Congress was held in Philadelphia in December 1918, attended by most of the members of the American Jewish Committee, Adler and Felix Warburg, alone among the committee’s membership, did not attend. Adler’s uncompromising opposition to Zionism, as reflected in his minority dissent from the prevailing consensus at the United Synagogue convention, produced tensions between Adler and the seminary faculty, almost all of whom (as we noted earlier) were committed and outspoken cultural Zionists. For example, it is reasonable to assume, that this issue might have been one of the several sources of friction between Adler and Professor Louis Ginzberg, who, as acting president of the United Synagogue in 1919, urged greater participation in the very “Zionist enterprise” that Adler continued to heatedly oppose: I believe that the time has come when the United Synagogue should take an active part in the work for the restoration of Palestine. Most of the 39 Cyrus Adler letter to Louis Marshall, July 6, 1917, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:331– 333 (Adler was subsequently persuaded to relent and remain on the American Jewish Committee’s executive.) 40 Parzen, Architects of Conservative Judaism, 122.

8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions

members of the United Synagogue, congregations as well as individuals, are enthusiastically engaged in the kind of work, and it is high time that the voice of our organization be heard in a matter so deeply affecting the spiritual life of the Jews.41

The uncompromising nature of Adler’s persistent opposition to the Basel program and the political aims of Zionism, as evidenced by his behavior at the United Synagogue convention, seems especially inexplicable in comparison with the mellowing attitude toward political Zionism being articulated by other prominent German-Jewish communal leaders, such as Louis Marshall and Jacob Schiff. In fact, the conventional interpretation that Adler’s antipathy toward Zionism prior to the 1920s was shaped primarily by the attitudes of the SchiffMarshall leadership group of which he was a part, and that, as Simcha Kling has tried to argue,42 he was in fact “a non-Zionist who was really a Zionist,” now seems to be sadly misleading. On the contrary: it can be argued on the basis of his newly published correspondence that by 1917 Adler’s “non-Zionism” had become much more stringent and uncompromising than that of most of the other Jewish communal leaders in his social circle. Take, for example, Louis Marshall, Adler’s confidant as chairman of the board of overseers of the Jewish Theological Seminary and longtime president of the American Jewish Committee. It was Marshall, as Jerome C. Rosenthal had correctly suggested, more than any other contemporary “uptown” German-Jewish leader, “who eloquently voiced . . . sympathy for the early Zionist efforts in the first decade of the twentieth century.”43 Marshall, although agreeing with Adler in his opposition to the Basie program and Jewish nationalism, was more open-minded with respect to the Zionist movement. During the first decade following the First Zionist Congress, “he had not so much opposed the movement as shown little interest in it because he thought it impractical.”44 Unlike Adler, Marshall stressed that though “he was neither Zionist nor Jewish nationalist,” he rejected the argument that Zionism was “incompatible with loyalty to America.”45 It is also reasonable 41 Ginzberg, United Synagogue Reports, 1913–19, 20. 42 Kling, “Cyrus Adler and Zionism,” 24. 43 Jerome C. Rosenthal, “A Fresh Look at Louis Marshall and Zionism, 1900–1912,” American Jewish Archives 32 (November 1980): 111. 44 Evyatar Friesel, “Jacob H. Schiff Becomes a Zionist: A Chapter in American-Jewish Self-Definition, 1907–1917,” Studies in Zionism 3 (Spring 1982): 63. 45 Ibid.

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to assume that Marshall’s close association with his brother-in-law, Judah L. Magnes, brought him into close contact with “the cultural Zionism of the American type” that was gaining increasing credence in American Zionist circles during the first decade of this century. Cultural Zionists such as Magnes, Harry Friedenwald, Schechter (after 1906), and especially Israel Friedlaender began “to reinterpret Zionism in terms that were better suited to American Jewish realities,” and to “create bridges” between themselves and Jewish leaders such as Marshall. Unlike Marshall, however, Adler remained curiously indifferent to their appeal, despite the fact that so many of these cultural Zionists were religious Jews like himself, and strongly identified with the goals and institutions of Conservative Judaism. Adler also remained antagonistic to political Zionism far longer than his friend and colleague Jacob Schiff, who until 1917 had been counted among the American Zionist movement’s most vocal opponents. In December of that year, Schiff, the outstanding Jewish philanthropist of the era and one of the most influential patrons of the Jewish Theological Seminary, announced his readiness to join the Zionist movement. Writing to the future president of the Zionist Organization of America, Judge Julian Mack, Schiff stated that he had become convinced of the desirability to seek the establishment of a Jewish homeland— and logically this should be Palestine—where the Jewish people would be again enabled to develop under their own institutions and in their own atmosphere Jewish life and ideals in their purity, and become once more a center from which the Jews throughout the world could draw religious inspiration and Jewish cultural development.46 And yet, as Professor Evyatar Friesel has noted in his thoughtful analysis of the episode, Adler could not understand Schiff ’s dramatic “conversion” to the Zionist cause, and greeted it with critical skepticism, rather than with enthusiastic support. “When Zionism adopts Judaism,” wrote Adler, “I believe a basis can be found on which all Jews will unite in promoting Jewish settlement in Palestine, but I would consider a settlement in Palestine on an anti- or non-religious basis the greatest misfortune that has happened to the Jews in modern times.”47 Subsequently, when Judge Mack, in his first official act as president of the newly formed Zionist Organization of America, invited Schiff, Marshall, and Adler to become “Shekel paying” members of the organization, Adler alone amongst the trio refused to consider joining. “I cannot accept,” Adler wrote to Mack at the 46 Ibid., 55. 47 Ibid., 72.

8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions

time. “The Zionist programme as I am sure you know from our frequent conversations is not adequate to satisfy my Jewish views with regard to the restoration of Palestine.”48 Also, Adler was on occasion less tolerant and understanding of Zionist leaders whom he did not respect or trust than other non-Zionist American Jewish leaders. Take, for example, his thoughts concerning the Anglo­Jewish Zionist leader Israel Zangwill, about which the recently published Adler letters shed much new light. In the aftermath of the seventh Zionist Congress, held in Basel in 1905, a faction within the Zionist movement that advocated acceptance of the British government’s offer of a Jewish territory within the protectorate of East Africa broke off from the movement. A rival body, the Jewish Territorial Organization, was formed under the leadership of the Jewish writer Israel Zangwill to explore non-Palestinian alternatives for mass Jewish settlement and to create autonomous Jewish territories wherever practicable. Adler’ attitude to this program, however, in opposition to that of such colleagues and friends as Oscar Straus and Mayer Sulzberger (who were among Zangwill’s leading supporters), was the same as his attitude toward Zionism: total rejection. Moreover, his correspondence with Israel Zangwill, whom Adler had known through his work with the Jewish Publication Society since the early 1890s, reveals that his attitude to Zangwill’s leadership within the Jewish community, and to Zangwill personally, was more antagonistic than one would ever imagine from reading the comments on Zangwill in Adler’s two published books. Adler wrote to Zangwill on November 1, 1905, in part as follows: In replying to your letter, I shall speak with the absolute frankness which its importance demands. I cannot recognize that you are a fitting leader in Israel and I cannot follow your leadership. Critic, poet, novelist and dramatist you are, and, as such, I have admired you . . . but at no time in all our contact have I ever taken you seriously as a leader in Israel or even suspected that you took yourself seriously. Your whole trend as a literary man dealing with Jewish things has been to project yourself outside of your own people in order that you might the better see them, and it seems to me that your habitual thought and your habitual life should have suggested to you, were your powers of introspection as great as your faculty of observation, that to other hands must be left the captaincy of the Jewish people.49 48 Cyrus Adler letter to Julian Mack, July 2, 1918, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:348–349. 49 Cyrus Adler letter to Israel Zangwill, November 1, 1905, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:117–118.

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Adler’s heretofore unpublished correspondence with Zangwill is, to say the least, distinctly at variance with the praise in which he eulogized Zangwill in an address delivered at a memorial meeting for Zangwill in 1926, and reprinted in Adler’s Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses, published in 1933.50 It is similarly at variance with his more tolerant and understanding assessment of Zangwill in his autobiography. His uncompromisingly hostile attitude to Zangwill and the program he espoused, as his correspondence with Oscar Straus indicates, came as a source of surprise and concern to some of his more tolerant non-Zionist colleagues. Straus wrote to Adler, expressing surprise and apparent displeasure at the “rudeness and insulting tone” toward Zangwill conveyed by Adler in the above letter. Adler responded to Straus, justifying his attitude toward Zangwill as follows: You speak of my rudeness and insulting tone toward Zangwill. I think that neither of these charges are justified. . . . I considered my letter to Zangwill for several days and toned down as much as I could consistent with my telling him what I understood to be the truth. I might have told him that he was incapacitated on many grounds from being a leader . . . because he was a traitor—a traitor to Herzl and a traitor to the Jewish people. . . . I, too, am in earnest about this territorialist organization and I believe that its final or partial success would be a greater disaster than was brought by Shabbatai Zevi. It is more likely to end as did the Ararat project of Mordecai M. Noah, and so I am all the sorrier to see men of standing and sobriety associated with it.51

The paradoxical nature of Adler’s relationship to Zionism has been noted by most students of Adler’s public career. It can be said, without exaggeration, that Adler’s attitude to Zionism and the Zionist movement was a study in contradictions. Adler’s staunch opposition—indeed, antipathy—to political Zionism prior to the 1920s was more uncompromising, and continued far longer, than that of his non-Zionist colleagues, such as Schiff, Straus, and Marshall. And yet, there were limits to the extent and vituperation of Adler’s non-Zionism. In October 1918, to cite but one example, Adler “unconditionally refused” to join in sponsoring a public meeting “in opposition to the Zionist Movement” being organized by Dr. David Philipson of Hebrew Union College in Cincin50 Adler, Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses, 103–108. 51 Cyrus Adler letter to Oscar Straus, November 12, 1905, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:119–121.

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nati. Philipson and a group of Reform rabbis, all “rabid anti-Zionists,” had called this meeting at a time when Zionism was at the “pinnacle of triumph” in the aftermath of the Balfour Declaration, issued the previous November. Forever the staunch non-Zionist, Adler refused to associate himself with the tactics and assumptions of the more virulently anti-Zionist forces within the Reform movement, led by Philipson and Hebrew Union College President Kaufmann Kohler of Cincinnati.52 Schiff, Marshall, Oscar Straus, and Henry Morgenthau, Sr., all leading members of the American Jewish Committee, followed Adler’s lead in rejecting the Philipson proposal to fight Zionism.53

Adler and Zionism during the 1920s There were several reasons why Adler became more receptive to the Zionist program during the 1920s. First, Chaim Weizmann and other Zionist leaders began to play down the ideology of Jewish nationalism and to stress “practical projects to meet the challenge of transforming deserts and swamps into an economically sound country.” The growing realization that Palestine remained the one land of refuge open to Jewish victims of persecution was another factor. While, as Naomi W. Cohen has noted, Adler, Marshall, and their non-Zionist colleagues could never support the Zionist argument, “which denied any possibility of meaningful Jewish survival in the Diaspora,” and would never actively encourage American Jewish emigration to Palestine, they did “recognize in Palestine a haven for East European Jewry.”54 Finally, following the Balfour Declaration, the United States government, through the Wilson administration, had officially approved the establishment of a Jewish homeland, an especially important consideration for the politically influential and sophisticated non­Zionist leadership group to which Adler belonged. The Zionist vs. non-Zionist debates of a decade earlier no longer held any meaning, since the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate had

52 The early history of the Reform movement’s staunch opposition to Zionism is analyzed in, among other works, Naomi W. Cohen, “The Reaction of Reform Judaism in America to Political Zionism (1897–1922),” Publications of the American Jewish Society 40 ( June 1951): 361–394; Joseph P. Sternstein, “Reform Judaism and Zionism, 1895–1904,” Herzl Yearbook 5 (1963): 11–31; Howard R. Greenstein, Turning Point: Zionism and Reform Judaism (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), chap. 1; and Michael A Meyer, “American Reform Judaism and Zionism: Early Efforts at Ideological Rapprochement,” Studies in Zionism 4 (Spring 1983): 49–64. 53 Parzen, “Conservative Judaism and Zionism,” 242. 54 Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 150.

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raised the dream of a Jewish homeland to a reality. With the approval of the US Congress for the establishment of that homeland, non-Zionists could now for the first time “move forward to work for Palestine” as loyal American citizens, “untroubled by spurious charges of dual Ioyalty.”55 By the early 1920s, Jewish leaders not formally affiliated with the Zionist movement, such as Adler, Marshall, Straus, and Irving Lehman, had come to feel that if the United States government could actively support the movement to establish a Jewish homeland, “every Jew was morally bound to respond in a positive way as well.” Thus, Louis Marshall cautioned the non-Zionists that “indifference . . . can do us a thousand times more harm than all the Ku Klux Klans and Henry Fords.”56 Adler and the non-Zionist leadership of the American Jewish Committee had, moreover, never admitted that the “question of Palestine” was the “exclusive preserve” of the Zionists. Adler had often “waxed indignant” at the claim that only Zionists could do work in Palestine. “I do not agree with any man that . . . Palestine is the sole concern of the Zionist Organization,” he had earlier stated. “The restoration of Palestine, except as far as the Reform movement is concerned, has always been the aim of the Jewish people, and nobody and no organization can speak for the Jewish people and say that it has the sole right to deal with it.”57 Adler reaffirmed his view that non-Zionists could work on behalf of Palestine by his growing determination, throughout the 1920s, to continue to help out in the development of the land. Encouraging non-Zionist financial support for Palestine through business, cultural, scientific, and agricultural projects, Adler was instrumental in establishing (in 1924) a new investment company, the Palestine Economic Corporation.58 55 Melvin I. Urofsky, American Zionism from Herzl to the Holocaust (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press and Doubleday, 1975), 319. 56 Ibid. 57 Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 128–129. 58 It is important to note that Adler’s genuine and abiding concern for Jews throughout the world motivated him to aid in the efforts for Jewish agricultural and educational development in Palestine even prior to the 1920s. Thus, for example, when Solomon Schechter of the Jewish Theological Seminary asked Adler to join Louis Marshall, Mortimer L Schiff, and himself on the American board of trustees of Haifa’s Technion, Adler accepted. Always willing to promote the “practical” work of Jewish colonization in Palestine, Adler had (in 1909) urged support for the Jewish Agricultural Experiment Station at Athlit as a means of raising the agricultural productivity of Palestine. He, like Louis Marshall, Jacob Schiff, and other Jewish leaders, became interested through meetings with a young agricultural scientist named Aaron Aaronsohn, who had discovered how to grow a prototype of wheat, barley, rye, and oats. World-renowned German botanists and the United States Department of Agriculture had praised Aaronsohn’s discovery. In writing to Louis Marshall, Adler introduced

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Adler’s experience as the representative of the American Jewish Committee at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 had, moreover, further convinced him of the importance of Zionist-non-Zionist cooperation in pursuit of common goals. The four months that Cyrus Adler in Paris in the spring of 1919 were, as Moshe Davis has pointed out,59 “one of the most significant periods” in his public career. While Louis Marshall was officially the president and spokesman for the Committee of Jewish Delegations to the Peace Conference, he worked closely with Adler in negotiating and articulating the positions arrived at by the Zionist and non-Zionist members of the committee at Paris Marshall and Adler “regarded themselves, and were regarded by others, as a team.”60 Their Committee of Jewish Delegations, while involved primarily in securing minority rights for the Jews of Eastern Europe, supported the Zionist program vis-à-vis Palestine as well.61 The committee’s theme was Jewish unity, and Adler, as the representative of the non-Zionist AJC, played an instrumental role in bringing non-Zionist and Zionist delegates to the Peace Conference together to achieve this end. Adler was, for example, instrumental in bringing Marshall and American Jewish Congress representative Judge Julian Mack together, thus establishing “the basis for a unified approach” between Zionist and nonZionist members of the delegations.62 He worked closely with the European Zionist leader Nahum Sokolow as well. The non-Zionist press “cemented the budding relationship” forged by Adler and Marshall “by displaying an indomitable faith in the peace-makers’ ability to solve the Jewish problem in Europe through agreements with the states of Central and Eastern Europe and in Palestine via British assumption of the mandate,”63 which was essentially the Zionist program as well.

59 60 61 62 63

Aaronsohn as “a man who has made important agricultural discoveries. . . . I believe that if he can carry out his plans, the agricultural regeneration of Palestine can be accomplished, that moreover, they have the greatest importance for all dry lands as indicating a form of reclamation which does not imply the great expense attached to irrigation” (Cyrus Adler letter to Louis Marshall, November 8, 1909, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:173–174). Adler wrote letters of introduction for Aaronsohn to Marshall, Schiff, and Professor Morris Loeb, urging that “the man and his ideas are worthy of a mighty push” (ibid., 1:174). Moshe Davis, “The Human Record: Cyrus Adler at the Peace Conference, 1919,” in Essays in American Jewish History (Cincinnati, OH: American Jewish Archives, 1958), 457. Ibid., 463. Knee, “Jewish Non-Zionism,” 212; see also Lawrence Kessler, “American Jews and the Paris Peace Conference,” YIVO Annual of Jewish Social Science 2 (1947–1948): 232–235. Davis, “The Human Record,” 462, footnote 14. Knee, “Jewish Non-Zionism,” 212.

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Adler’s change of attitude toward Zionism was also attributable, in part, to the change in leadership of the World Zionist Organization, after its acrimonious Cleveland Conference of 1921, from Brandeis to Weizmann. Adler’s attitude toward Zionism prior to 1921 had been shaped in some degree by his dislike and distrust of the men who constituted the American Zionist leadership, Stephen S. Wise and Louis D. Brandeis in particular, and the democratization of Jewish public life that they espoused. Adler, as many of his contemporaries and associates have attested, was above all an aristocrat, and while he was a firm defender of democracy in American life, this belief did not necessarily carry over to Jewish affairs.64 Adler’s longstanding personality conflicts with the leadership of the Federation of American Zionists were, beginning in 1915, accentuated during the battle over the issue of the American Jewish Congress. Adler had long considered the leadership of the Federation of American Zionists a “highly unpalatable” group with whom to work. Weak in membership and funds, the FAZ nonetheless “attracted orators and journalists who took particular delight in sneering at the American Jewish Committee for its undemocratic organization, discreet methods, alleged political conservatism and lack of Jewish heart.”65 Adler and his colleagues of the committee interpreted the Zionist methods of mass appeal, geared especially to the new immigrants from Eastern Europe, as an effort to capture the leadership of the American Jewish Committee. Thus, in June 1915, for example, Adler wrote in com­ plaint to Solomon Schechter as follows: In the Jewish political world, [Louis] Marshall, [ Jacob] Schiff, Judge [Mayer] Sulzberger and myself are now the principal objects of attack and we are denounced as being unfit for the management of Jewish affairs. A very strong and determined movement . . . are making a political

64 Louis Lipsky has commented that Adler “refused to go along with the democratic trends in Jewish life. . . . He seemed to think that democracy was an alien notion in Jewish life.” In his leadership style, Lipsky has suggested, Adler was, at least during most of his career, “critical and caustic, dictatorial and intolerant.” Louis Lipsky, A Gallery of Zionist Profiles (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1956), 210–212. Herman Rubenovitz, one of Adler’s contemporaries and his coworker in the organization of the United Synagogue, would later comment that Adler was “a firm believer in maintaining the established order whereby leadership in Jewish affairs was to be left to certain prominent families of wealth and public spirit. He was entirely out of sympathy with the democratic trends in Jewish life, which became manifest at the turn of the century” and found expression in the Zionist movement and the Zionistinspired campaign for an American Jewish Congress. Herman and Mignon Rubenovitz, The Waking Heart (Cambridge, MA: Nathaniel Dame, 1967), 55–56. 65 Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 105.

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campaign for the purpose of securing an American Jewish Congress and definitely in my opinion for the purpose of overthrowing the American Jewish Committee. . . . It is part of a general Zionist programme for the capture of Jewish organizations and the calling of an international Jewish Congress under Zionist auspices.66

The urbane and charming Chaim Weizmann posed no such threat. On the contrary: Weizmann, like Adler, had disliked Theodor Herzl, as he and Adler would later scorn their common rival, Brandeis. Weizmann, like Adler, was now ready to avoid all discussions of Zionist political ideology, and all questions of statehood, in a common program devoted to the economic and agricultural development of Palestine. By the early 1920s, Weizmann could explain that Zionists like himself would be happy to work on a nonideological basis alongside those who did not share their particular philosophical views. Indeed, Weizmann approvingly quoted Judge Mayer Sulzberger’s comment that “it is sometimes good to do the right thing even for the wrong reasons,”67 an attitude with which the always pragmatic Adler could easily concur. In fact, it can be argued that in terms of their personalities and leadership styles, as well as their political pragmatism, Adler and Weizmann had much in common. Weizmann, like Adler, was by nature an aristocrat who had a profound distrust of the Jewish masses and their role in Jewish affairs.68 Yosef Gorni’s characterization of Weizmann could well have applied to Adler as well: his “elitist aristocratic bent . . . based on his belief in the serving elite, set him apart from the masses whom he . . . pitied but by whom he was also repelled.”69 Weizmann and Adler shared, moreover, an autocratic leadership style that left little room or tolerance for opposition. Weizmann, like Adler, had disliked Theodor Herzl. Both were openly contemptuous of some rivals—Adler showed a continual antipathy toward Israel Zangwill and Stephen Wise,70 as evidenced in his corre66 Cyrus Adler letter to Solomon Schechter, June 9, 1915, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:273–274. 67 Urofsky, American Zionism, 320–321. 68 “On several occasions,” as Yehuda Reinharz has noted, “Weizmann made it clear that he distrusted the instincts of the masses.” Yehuda Reinharz, “Chaim Weizmann: The Shaping of a Zionist Leader Before World War I,” Journal of Contemporary History 18, no 2 (April 1983): 207. Moreover, as Yosef Gorni has pointed out, “Weizmann underestimated mass action and did not comprehend its political importance.” Yosef Gorni, “Chaim Weizmann as Zionist Leader,” Midstream 27 (May 1982): 47. 69 Gorni, “Chaim Weizmann as Zionist Leader,” 43. 70 Thus, for example, Adler noted in a letter to Judah L. Magnes concerning the board of governors of the Hebrew University: “The insistence of yourself and others of the presence

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spondence, and Weizmann had a well-known and often bitter rivalry with David Ben-Gurion—and did not hesitate to employ insulting language against those with whom they disagreed. To his political opponents Weizmann “bore a constant grudge and never forgave them,”71 a trait exhibited by Adler as well. Adler could never forgive Brandeis and Wise for opposing him on the congress issue, and thus would not ally himself with the Zionist movement until they had been ousted from its leadership, and had been replaced by Weizmann.

Adler, Weizmann, and the Jewish Agency The change in personalities within the leadership of the Zionist movement after 1921 thus significantly influenced Adler’s relationship to the movement. Chaim Weizmann, unlike Herzl, Wise, or Brandeis, shared Adler’s pragmatism, sought Adler’s advice, and respected his political judgment. Indeed, Adler’s changing attitude toward Zionism and cooperation with the Zionist movement during the 1920s can be attributed, in no small measure, to the politically shrewd initiative taken by Weizmann to seek the involvement of Adler and other prominent non-Zionists in the practical affairs and governance of the yishuv. He intended to achieve this by expanding the Jewish Agency, the body that served as the “official liaison” with Great Britain on matters affecting Jewish Palestine. The first step toward a Zionist-non-Zionist rapprochement was taken in 1924 when Adler and Louis Marshall agreed, at Weizmann’s urging, to assemble “a full-scale conference of non-Zionists” to discuss participation in an enlarged Jewish Agency and the establishment of an investment corporation to aid the economic development of Palestine. On February 8, 1924, Adler, Marshall, Herbert Lehman, and Judge Horace B. Stern—all pillars of the German-Jewish non-Zionist community—sent out a letter to 150 prominent Jews not affiliated with the Zionist Organization of America. “The time has come,” said the invitation, “when we firmly believe that the duty rests upon the Jews of this country who are not members of or affiliated with the Zionist Organization, to consider seriously their relations to the economic problems of Palestine and to its cultural and industrial upbuilding.”72 Initial opposition to Weizmann’s plan of Dr Stephen S. Wise on this Board is not likely to make for my continued cooperation, at least, if I have to sit in the room with that gentleman very often.” Cyrus Adler letter to Judah L. Magnes, July 21, 1926, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:130–131. 71 Ibid. 72 Urofsky, American Zionism, 318.

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disappeared when Adler and his non-Zionist colleagues accepted the term “Jewish National Home” in the preamble of the Jewish Agency’s constitution.73 In 1928, a committee of seven non-Zionists, including Adler, was appointed to name the forty-four American members of the enlarged agency. Weizmann’s long sought-after goal was finally achieved at Zurich in the summer of 1929. Weizmann was elected president, and Marshall chairman, of the agency’s council, in which Zionists and non-Zionists held 112 seats each. Among the eminent non­Zionists who attended the first meeting of the expanded agency at Zurich were Leon Blum, Albert Einstein, and Cyrus Adler. While Adler would later disclaim any significant role in the creation and development of the expanded Jewish Agency, he must certainly be credited with being one of its most influential architects and farsighted leaders. A month after the Zurich meeting Louis Marshall died, and Adler assumed his role and responsibilities as the leading non-Zionist member of the agency, serving both as president of the agency’s council and as chairman of its administrative committee. With characteristic dedication and effectiveness, Adler would subsequently participate in the management and decision­making of the Jewish Agency for close to a decade. Through his work on behalf of the agency, which occupied much of his time and correspondence between 1929 and 1932, Adler gained a new respect for Chaim Weizmann, corresponded with him regularly, and supported him on a number of public issues. And, as the several references to Adler in the published letters and papers of Chaim Weizmann indicate, Adler’s growing respect for Weizmann did not go unreciprocated. Weizmann began, increasingly, during these years, to value Adler’s political advice, support, and friendship.74 A few days after the sessions of the expanded agency concluded in 1929, riots broke out in Palestine. They were followed by the issuance of the Passfield White Paper, which announced the British government’s decision to curtail land sales and Jewish immigration to Palestine. The Revisionists within the World Zionist Organization and the Jewish Agency Executive, led by Vladimir Jabotinsky, blamed the White Paper on Weizmann’s policy of cooperation with the British, and sought his ouster from leadership. Adler, however, spoke eloquently in Weizmann’s defense, claiming that “the blame for the White Paper could not 73 Cohen, Not Free to Desist, 151. 74 See, for example, Weizmann’s letters to Felix M. Warburg of November 22, 1929, January 16, 1930, January 17, 1930, February 28, 1930, and June 26, 1930, in The Letters and Papers of Chaim Weizmann, vol. 14, series A ( Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1978), nos. 102, 184, 188, 209, and 328. See also Weizmann’s letter to Cyrus Adler of January 4, 1932, ibid., vol. 15, series A, no. 234.

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be laid . . . on the shoulders of Weizmann.”75 In subsequently urging Felix Warburg to reconsider his decision to resign from the Jewish Agency Executive, he reminded Warburg of the importance of the participation of non-Zionists such as themselves within the newly expanded agency that Weizmann had created: If you withdraw, it will involve the withdrawal of many other non-Zionists in the Agency in this country and possibly some abroad. One has to contemplate what the final effect will be. Of course, I cannot predict the coming elections to the Zionist Congress, but with the announcement of your withdrawal I imagine a considerable part of the support of Weizmann would fall. The Revisionists, joined by the Mizrachi, would I think probably control the Congress.76

Adler’s response to the Passfield White Paper was not delimited to support for his new friend and colleague, Weizmann, in the internecine struggles or the Zionist movement. Adler responded vigorously in the public arena as well, “denouncing the British for hypocrisy and tearing the White Paper to shreds.”77 At a public meeting in Philadelphia, he declared: “Our effort in Palestine may be delayed [but] it cannot be stopped.”78 The riots that led to the Passfield White Paper had begun with Arabs attacking Jews at the Western Wall. Wanting to disprove Arab contentions, Weizmann asked Adler to prepare a memorandum to be submitted to the League or Nations clarifying Jewish rights to the Western Wall, an undertaking that Adler could not refuse. As he wrote to the British historian and Zionist leader Louis Namier: “The request, originally conveyed by Doctor [Chaim] Weizmann through Mr. [Felix M.] Warburg, places upon me a great responsibility which I am far from anxious to have, but which I do not feel that I have a right to shirk if it is the deliberate judgement of everybody concerned that I am the person to undertake the task.”79 In his lengthy memorandum, published in book form in 1930,80 Adler succinctly outlined the argument for Jewish rights at the Wall 75 Cyrus Adler letter to Felix Warburg, March 31, 1931, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:214–220. 76 Ibid., 10. 77 Kling, “Cyrus Adler and Zionism,” 26. 78 Adler, Lectures, Selected Papers. Addresses, 331. 79 Cyrus Adler letter to Louis Namier, January 30, 1930, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 80 This was published as Memorandum on the Western Wall, Prepared for the Special Commission of the League of Nations on Behalf of the Jewish Agency for Palestine (Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1930).

8. Cyrus Adler, Non-Zionism, and the Zionist Movement: A Study in Contradictions

and endeavored, as he wrote to Weizmann, “to establish the historical basis for the Jewish claim that for at least one thousand years they have had free access to the Wall for the purpose of prayer.”81 Adler’s effort was an unequivocal success. His book proved to be “a masterly presentation of the historic rights of Jews,” and “a model of scholarship.”82 Indeed, the volume proved to be “so convincing” that the special commission appointed by the League of Nations granted all the claims set forth in it. After the British withdrew the worst features of the White Paper, Adler withdrew from the leadership ranks of the Jewish Agency to devote his time and energies to his manifold communal responsibilities as president of the seminary, Dropsie College, and the American Jewish Committee. When Louis Marshall died in September 1929, Adler had succeeded him as committee president. Together with Judge Horace Stern of Philadelphia, Adler sought “to stir the impulses and imagination” of the American Jewish Committee’s influential non-Zionist leadership “in the spirit and for the cause” of the Jewish Agency for Palestine.83 While president of the committee, Adler continued as an active and valuable member of the Jewish Agency, devoting much of his increasingly scarce time, and a great deal of his correspondence, to its activities and programs. For example, when the British issued another White Paper following the 1936 riots, one that suggested the partitioning of Palestine, Adler drafted an “alternative” proposal for the Jewish Agency Executive to consider. Achieving peaceful relations between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was another goal of Adler’s during the 1930s, which he hoped to further through his work within the Jewish Agency. One of the most “intractable and elusive problems” Adler ever faced, it was one to which he devoted much energy and correspondence during his last decade.84 As one of the pivotal figures within the leadership of the Jewish Agency during the 1930s, Adler provided the necessary link between the non­Zionist world, for which the American Jewish Committee was spokesman, and the realization of the Zionist program that only non-Zionist cooperation and support could help to achieve. Adler reminded the Zionist leadership of the agency of the seminal role played by the non-Zionist leadership of his American Jewish Committee in 81 Cyrus Adler letter to Chaim Weizmann, April 2, 1930, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:189–191. 82 Kling, “Cyrus Adler and Zionism,” 26. 83 Neuman, Cyrus Adler, 212. 84 See, for example, his correspondence with Judah L. Magnes during this period: for example, his letter to Magnes of March 5, 1930, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:185–189.

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financial contributions to Palestine since 1929,85 and even threatened to resign from the agency if the non­Zionists within the body were to be made “the target of constant reproach.”86 Adler did not resign, however, but continued to work for Zionist and non-Zionist cooperation and succeeded in shaping the consensus between Zionists and non-Zionists upon which the success and achievement of the Jewish Agency for Palestine was based. This was, perhaps, one of Cyrus Adler’s greatest contributions to Jewish public life during the 1930s.

Conclusion One of the most gifted and farsighted Jewish public servants and communal leaders of his generation, Adler played a pivotal role in the creation and development of an extraordinary number of Jewish institutions and communal enterprises. A Jewish public figure who was uniquely able to interpret the needs of religious Jews to the wealthy German-Jewish philanthropists of American Jewry, Adler inspired awe and respect (if not affection) in all the various groupings of the Jewish community, including those opposed to him. It would thus be difficult to overestimate the potential ramifications that Adler’s active involvement with the American Zionist movement might have had. What Evyatar Friesel has said of Jacob Schiff can, I think, legitimately be said of Adler as well: “His joining the Zionist Movement would certainly have been a considerable moral victory for the Zionists, and a strong impetus for the movement in the United States.”87 Unlike Julian Mack and Nathan Straus, among others in his social circle, Adler would never formally identify with or join the Zionist movement. Unlike Schiff and Marshall,88 he would never even come close to officially joining the Zionist ranks. And yet, during the 1920s he played perhaps the pivotal role in forging the rapprochement between the Zionist and non­Zionist leadership within the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and played a significant role in the growth and development of that most important of Zionist institutions. In so doing, it may be argued, he helped to make the Zionist movement of that day more “respectable” to the non-Zionist leadership of his social circle, while at the same time 85 Cyrus Adler letter to Moses A. Leavitt, February 11, 1932, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:234–235. 86 Ibid. 87 Friesel, “Jacob H. Schiff Becomes a Zionist,” 56–57. 88 For a thoughtful and detailed discussion of why “Schiff ’s intention of joining the Zionist Movement was never consummated,” see ibid., 55–92.

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guaranteeing the continued participation and financial support of the non-Zionist leadership of the American Jewish Committee in the work and program of the Jewish Agency. This was, to say the least, not an insignificant achievement. It was, arguably, an accomplishment that a Stephen Wise, Judah Magnes, Israel Friedlaender, or even a Solomon Schechter could never have achieved. It took someone with the avowedly non-Zionist background and “credentials” of a Cyrus Adler—so long aloof from the Zionist movement and its political concerns—who at the same time could command the cooperation and respect of those to whom he was opposed. Indeed, it can be argued that, after the death of Marshall, no other American Jewish communal figure but Adler could have succeeded in bringing such a rapprochement about. To have been thus able to shape such an alliance, and working consensus, between the non-Zionist American Jewish establishment of his era and a section of the World Zionist movement may well be considered one of the more important accomplishments of Adler’s varied and distinguished public career. Thus, paradoxically, within the last decade of his life, and without ever adhering to Zionist ideology, Cyrus Adler made a profound and enduring contribution to the Zionist movement of which he never formally became a part.

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Cyrus Adler and the Rescue of Jewish Refugee Scholars* For close to fifty years, Cyrus Adler occupied a unique place in American Jewish public life. One of the organizers of the Jewish Publication Society, Adler was also a founder of the American Jewish Historical Society and its president for more than twenty years. Having played an instrumental role in organizing the American Jewish Committee in 1906, he served as its president from 1929 until his death in 1940. During his thirty-two years as president of Dropsie College, Adler shaped that institution into one of the preeminent institutions of higher Jewish learning in America. Serving as president of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America for twenty-five years, from 1915 to 1940, while remaining president of Dropsie as well, Adler played a central role in the founding of the United Synagogue, whose presidency he also held. An editor of the American Jewish Year Book, Adler was also the sole editor for many years of the Jewish Quarterly Review, the only English­language journal then devoted to Jewish studies. A friend and confidant of presidents, political leaders, philanthropists, university administrators and Jewish scholars, Adler’s involvement and influence was pervasive in virtually every aspect of Jewish life in America and abroad from the 1890s through the 1930s. One of the least known aspects of Adler’s varied and distinguished public career was the important role he played in the rescue and job placement of refugee Jewish scholars from Hitler’s Europe. Adler does not mention this dimension of his public career in his autobiography or in his other published writings.1

*

1

“Cyrus Adler and the Rescue of Jewish Refugee Scholars” was published in the March 1989 issue of American Jewish History. Reprinted by permission of the American Jewish Historical Society. Cyrus Adler, I Have Considered the Days (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1941); and Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses (Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1933).

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Abraham A. Neuman, in his biography of Adler, published in the 1940s,2 also ignores it. The recent publication of Ira Robinson’s two-volume collection of Adler’s letters3 and the American Jewish Archives valuable collection of the correspondence between Adler and Hebrew Union College President Julian Morgenstern shed new light on this significant chapter of Adler’s public life.4 With Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Jewish academicians who had succeeded in gaining university positions during the liberal Weimar period found themselves summarily out of work. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, enacted by the Nazi regime on April 7, 1933, authorized the expulsion of all Jews from the German civil service. “Civil servants of non­Aryan descent must retire” and honorary officials “must be discharged.” Since the universities and research institutes in Germany were, for the most part, state bodies, their professors, lecturers, and research faculty were considered honorary state officials subject to the new antisemitic decree.5 Germany’s foremost physicist, Professor Albert Einstein of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Science, was among the first forced to leave the country.6 The eminent Jewish director of the chemistry section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Professor Fritz Haber, whose discovery of the process for obtaining combined nitrogen from air had enabled Germany to save itself during the first years of World War I, was also compelled to resign.7 The application of the Nazi Civil Service Law to universities resulted in the dismissal of hundreds of scholars and research scientists during the next two years.8 In 1933 and 1934 alone, 650 German academicians—primarily Jews but including many non-Jewish political opponents of the Nazi regime as well— emigrated from Germany. Many more were to emigrate during the following four years. A great number of these Jewish refugee scholars eventually migrated

2 3 4 5

6 7 8

Abraham A. Neuman, Cyrus Adler: A Biographical Sketch (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1942). Ira Robinson, ed., Cyrus Adler: Selected Letters (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1985). American Jewish Archives [AJA], Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati, OH. Norman Bentwich, The Rescue and Achievement of Refugee Scholars (The Hague: Mouton, 1953), 1; Lucy S. Dawidowicz, The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945 (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 58–59. Bentwich, The Rescue, 3. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 1–4.

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to America. Some found employment in universities outside Germany; others languished in unsuitable occupations. The migration of German scholars was the most remarkable migration in the intellectual world since the expulsion of Greek scholars from Constantinople in the fifteenth century, an event that gave impetus to the Renaissance.9 The impact of this migration was especially evident in America. As Lewis Coser and others have documented, many Jewish refugee scholars from Nazi persecution—among them, Kurt Lewin, Bruno Bettelheim, Erich Fromm, Paul Lazarsfield, Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss, Hans Morgenthau, and Hans Rosenberg—made profound and enduring contributions to American scholarship and intellectual life after World War II.10 The migration of Jewish refugee scholars would also have a profound impact on the evolution and transformation of Jewish scholarship and Jewish studies as an academic discipline in America. The Nazi Holocaust brought to an end the entire world of European Jewish scholarship: the great centers of such scholarship and culture, the institutions of higher learning, the scholarly books and journals they published, were all destroyed. Some important European Jewish scholars were brought to America as refugees before the war and the beginning of Hitler’s Final Solution. The role of Cyrus Adler and other American Jewish leaders in the rescue, resettlement, and job placement of these refugee scholars in the field of Jewish studies is a fascinating yet neglected chapter of American Jewish history that few Jewish historians have seriously studied.11 Well before January 20, 1933, when President Hindenburg appointed Hitler chancellor, Adler was already concerned about the rising antisemitism in Europe, especially in Germany. Contrary to what some of Adler’s critics have alleged, Adler did not ignore the handwriting on the wall, the drastic deterioration in the situation of German Jewry as a result of Hitler’s rise to power. As early as March 20, 1933, he met with Secretary of State Cordell Hull to request that the United States officially protest the persecution of the Jews of Germany. Time and again, between 1933 and 1935, he personally tried to convince Secretary of

Ibid., 10; and Stephen Duggan and Betty Drury, The Rescue of Science and Learning (New York: Macmillan, 1948), 1–5. 10 Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and Experiences (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984). 11 The major exception is Michael A. Meyer, See his excellent article: “The Refugee Scholars Project of the Hebrew Union College,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Bertram Wallace Korn (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1976), 359–375. 9

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State Hull that some type of US intercession was called for.12 His correspondence from the spring and summer of 1933 reveals his growing despair over the rapidly deteriorating situation in Nazi Germany. In a letter of April 7, 1933, the very day that the Hitler regime enacted its antisemitic Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, Adler described the situation in Germany as “indescribably bad” and “absolutely unparalleled in modern times.” The “shifting of the [Nazi] policies from day to day,” he wrote, “almost makes one think that the country is a madhouse—I am afraid it is.”13 In a June 15 letter to Wilbur K. Thomas, executive director of the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation, organized in 1930 to promote understanding and good will between the United States and Germany, Adler lamented that I find myself far from believing that such goodwill is desired by the ruling classes in Germany, except as the basis of advantage to themselves. The present government in Germany, and at least a majority of the people of Germany, in my opinion are in a frame of mind and conduct which is more nearly that of the barbarism of the Middle Ages than that of a civilized society in the twentieth century. A country which will drive from its universities. schools, medical profession, legal profession and civil service those people who committed no other offense than that of not being members of the dominant party or not belonging to what is fancifully called the “Aryan group,” is not one with which good understanding may be cultivated. . . .14

Between 1933 and 1939 Adler was especially concerned about the continuing plight of those displaced Jewish scholars who were seeking to migrate to, and secure suitable academic, appointments, in America. As Michael A. Meyer has noted, “those whose fields were related to Jewish studies in many instances sought to associate themselves with a specifically Jewish institution in Germany or abroad.”15 In the fall of 1934, Hebrew Union College, under the leadership of its president, Julian Morgenstern, took the lead in trying to ameliorate the plight of two of these displaced Jewish scholars by appropriating money for their

12 Henry L. Feingold, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1970), 12. For a description of these activities, see Cyrus Adler and Aaron M. Margalith, With Firmness in the Right: American Diplomatic Action Affecting Jews, 1840–1945 (New York: The American Jewish Committee, 1946). 13 Cyrus Adler letter to Louis Ginzberg, April 7, 1933, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:248. 14 Adler letter to Wilbur K. Thomas, June 15, 1933 in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:268. 15 Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project,” 359.

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temporary employment on the Cincinnati campus of HUC for a single semester in the year 1935–1936.16 Such a monetary commitment was crucial since the interpretation of United States immigration laws allowed non-quota visas only to those refugee scholars who would be paid a minimal salary for at least two years.17 As president of the Jewish Theological Seminary and of Dropsie College, Adler was in a unique position to help Morgenstern secure academic employment for Jewish refugee scholars in America. In April 1934, he used a grant that the seminary had received from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars to appoint Dr. Alexander Sperber, a biblical scholar recently dismissed by the Nazis from his teaching position at the University of Bonn, to the JTS faculty for one year. The Emergency Committee, which Adler’s friend and JTS Trustee Felix M. Warburg had helped to found,18 raised funds on behalf of displaced refugee scholars and made these funds available to colleges and universities. During the following three years, Adler was instrumental in securing for Sperber a permanent academic position in the United States. In February of 1935 Sperber began teaching at Dropsie College, where he continued to lecture through 1938. At the same time, through Adler’s efforts, Sperber’s one-year appointment to the JTS faculty was extended for two more years.19 In 1938 Sperber became a permanent member of the JTS faculty, where he would teach Targum and the Septuagint as well as biblical exegesis until his retirement in 1970. Adler also actively assisted Sperber in securing funding for the publication of his work on the Targum. In January 1936 Adler wrote Morgenstern that the Swiss publisher E. J. Brill was ready to publish Sperber’s landmark study of the Targum Onkelos, but needed a $1,000 subvention. To Morgenstern and others within the academic community whom he approached for the subvention, Adler emphasized the significance of Sperber’s research: This edition of the Targum Onkelos by Sperber is a great advance on the previous texts of the Pentateuch. He had the opportunity of examining all the manuscripts of Targum available in European libraries. He has in16 17 18 19

Ibid., 360. Ibid., 374, footnote 19. Duggan and Drury, The Rescue of Science and Learning, 6. Herman Dicker, Of Learning and Libraries: The Seminary Library at One Hundred (New York: The Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1988), 65. See also “Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary held on Wednesday, June 10, 1936,” in Cyrus Adler Papers, Jewish Theological Seminary, archives 1, box 9.

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troduced into the text not only the superior readings of these old manuscripts but also the Babylonian punctuation as he found it recorded. This older punctuation gives us, for the first time, a clue to the correct punctuation of the Targum and so is of primary importance for Aramaic grammar.

Professor Sperber’s scholarship, concluded Adler, “indicates how frequently the readings of the Targum help in determining the correct reading of the biblical text.”20 As a result of Adler’s and Morgenstern’s efforts, Felix Warburg and other Jewish philanthropists concerned with the resettlement of refugee scholars in America pledged money towards the subvention.21 Adler also involved Morgenstern and Professor William Foxwell Albright of Johns Hopkins University in his attempt to interest the American Council of Learned Societies in publishing Sperber’s monograph on Hebrew Based upon Greek and Latin Transliterations. Morgenstern, who had formerly been a member of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Committee on Grants in Aid of Research and was frequently consulted by the Council “with regard to works on Semitic, Jewish or Biblical interest,” offered to lobby for the publication of Sperber’s work.22 Beginning in the fall of 1934, Adler also began to work closely with Morgenstern to find a permanent academic appointment for the Jewish Assyriologist Julius Lewy, who was then already in the United States. Lewy, according to Julian Morgenstern “unquestionably . . . one of the three foremost Jewish Assyriologists in the world today,” had been a professor of Semitic languages and oriental history at the University of Giessen until he was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933.23 A temporary teaching position at the Sorbonne in Paris was followed by a visiting professorship at Johns Hopkins University in the fall of 1934.24 In 1935 Adler was instrumental in securing another grant from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, though which Lewy was able to teach for a semester at JTS.25 It was Adler’s intention, as he wrote to Morgenstern, that Lewy use his semester at JTS to develop contacts within academic circles in the New York area that might lead to a permanent appointment: “Columbia 20 21 22 23 24 25

Adler letter to Morgenstern, January 14, 1936, AJA. Morgenstern letters to Adler, October 16, 1936, and October 30, 1936, AJA. Morgenstern letter to Adler, October 30, 1936, AJA. Morgenstern letter to Adler, January 29, 1935, AJA. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project,” 360. As Michael A. Meyer has noted, Morgenstern also applied to the Emergency Committee to support Lewy’s appointment, but was turned down; ibid., 373, footnote 6.

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has no Assyriologist, the Union Theological Seminary has none, and as far as I know the Metropolitan Museum of Art has none. Lewy has a good personality and I thought he might, through acquaintances, make his way there.”26 Adler offered, moreover, to use his vast network of contacts within the scholarly world to secure a permanent academic position for Lewy. Adler had at first hoped to facilitate Lewy’s appointment to a new chair of Assyriology at Dropsie College in Philadelphia, even though Dropsie students could then conveniently study Assyriology at the University of Pennsylvania without paying any additional fees.27 But because of the declining financial situation of the college, whose income from its endowment had “shrunk about 45%,” Adler soon recognized with regret that he “could not dream of making any new permanent appointments” in the near future. Adler also contacted his close friend Hebert Winlock, Director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, on Lewy’s behalf: Winlock’s father had been a colleague of Adler’s at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC for a number of years, and Adler had known Winlock, a distinguished archaeologist and Egyptologist, who served as Director of the Metropolitan Museum in 1932–1939, since his childhood.28 While Adler’s hope that the Metropolitan Museum might be able to employ Lewy as a full-time curator of its Assyrian text collection did not materialize, Winlock did notify Adler that the Museum had two or three boxes of unpublished cuneiform tablets that he could make available to Lewy for his research. It was, as Adler wrote Morgenstern, “an opening for him [Lewy] to get acquainted with the Director of a very large Museum and possibly to attract some attention by publishing some unpublished cuneiform material in New York.”29 Through Adler’s influence, Lewy was thus able to make valuable professional contacts, which enhanced his scholarly reputation during the semester he taught at JTS. Adler’s efforts to secure a permanent academic position for Lewy at the University of Chicago and Yale University were noteworthy, albeit ultimately unsuccessful. At the Oriental Institute in Chicago, as Michael A. Meyer has noted, “Lewy’s Judaism and his Zionism both worked to his disadvantage.”30 As an in26 27 28 29 30

Adler letter to Morgenstern, January 31, 1935, 1, AJA. Ibid. Ibid. Adler letter to Morgenstern, February 27, 1935, AJA. Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project,” 373, footnote 7; this subject is discussed further in Morgenstern letter to Julius Lewy, January 8, 1935; and Lewy letter to Morgenstern, March 11, 1935, both in Julius Lewy file, AJA.

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fluential member of the board of trustees of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Adler recommended that the Hebrew University invite Lewy to fill its chair of Assyriology when and if that position should become vacant. Adler also wrote to his friend Professor William Foxwell Albright of Johns Hopkins University to ascertain “what steps might be taken” in Lewy’s behalf for professorships at Cornell or Stanford. With the death, in 1936, of Richard Gottheil, Columbia University’s distinguished professor of Semitic languages, another potential academic slot for Julius Lewy opened. In October 1936 Julian Morgenstern wrote to Columbia’s president, Nicholas Murray Butler, to formally suggest the name of Professor Julius Lewy “as a possible successor to Professor Richard Gottheil.”31 Butler thanked Morgenstern for “bringing the name of Dr. Lewy to his consideration” and assured him “that it would receive careful and sympathetic consideration,” but he offered the position to George Antonius, a Palestine Arab nationalist, who was reputed to be “a propagandist for the Mufti” of Jerusalem.32 When Butler’s offer to Antonius, apparently made without consulting anyone on the Columbia faculty, became known, Adler, Morgenstern, and other Jewish leaders were astonished. After Gottheil’s widow wrote a letter of protest to Butler,33 Adler helped arrange a meeting of distinguished Jewish alumni of Columbia with Butler, so they could formally protest the Antonius appointment. At the urging of Adler and Rabbi Louis Newman of New York, Solomon M. Stroock, chairman of JTS’s board of governors and a trustee of Columbia’s Teachers College, and Judge Joseph Proskauer, who would succeed Adler as president of the American Jewish Committee and was a preeminent member of the New York Bar, met with Butler. At this meeting, Butler agreed not to confirm the appointment until he secured more information about Antonius from the British Foreign Office and from Sir Hebert Samuel, the British high commissioner of Palestine.34

31 Morgenstern letter to Adler, October 16, 1936, AJA. 32 Adler letter to Morgenstern, October 23, 1936; and Morgenstern letter to Adler, October 30, 1936, both in AJA; Menahem Kaufman, “George Antonius and American Universities,” American Jewish History 75 ( June 1986): 393–394. 33 In her letter to Butler, in which she personally appealed to him to withdraw the Antonius appointment, Emma Gottheil characterized Antonius as an “antisemite . . . a great enemy of my people” who has helped incite the present “warfare in Palestine where innocent men, women and children have been massacred” and as a “racial propagandist.” (Kaufman, “George Antonius and American Universities,” 393.) 34 Adler letter to Morgenstern, October 23, 1936, AJA.

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However, Butler remained uninterested in appointing Lewy to the Columbia vacancy. At Columbia, as at the University of Chicago, Lewy’s Judaism and Zionism seem to have worked against him. Much has been written about the genteel antisemitism at Columbia University in the 1920s and 1930s,35 during Butler’s conservative administration. On the undergraduate faculty, for example, as Sidney Hook has recalled, Jews were then “almost as rare as albinos.”36 And although a few of the elder statesmen on the graduate faculty were Jewish—E. A. R. Seligman in economics, Gottheil in Semitic languages, and Franz Boas in anthropology—the number of Jews in practically all departments of the graduate faculty was extremely small. During the 1930s, moreover, distinguished members of the Columbia faculty were known to be sympathetic to Hitler and the Nazi movement: F. J. E. Woodbridge, Johnstonian professor of philosophy and dean of the Columbia Graduate School, who had spent a year as a Theodore Roosevelt Exchange Professor at the University of Berlin in 1931–1932, thought well of the Nazi movement and believed “that there were justified grievances that would have to be met.” Another senior member of Columbia’s Philosophy Department, without endorsing the Nazi program, “discoursed at length about the disproportionate number of Jews in the professions and business.”37 By 1936, when Adler, Morgenstern, Stroock, and Proskauer were seeking to interest Butler in appointing Lewy, senior faculty at Columbia were decidedly reticent to risk incurring Butler’s antagonism by recommending the hiring of Jewish professors.38 Indeed, during the spring of 1936 Lionel Trilling, who had been an instructor at Columbia for four years, was threatened with dismissal because of his Jewishness. The chairman of the English Department told Trilling that he was not being rehired because, as a Jew, he would not be happy in their department.39 Given these sentiments, it is not surprising that Butler and his administration showed little interest in appointing Julius Lewy to a senior faculty position. In 35 See, for example, Sidney Hook, “Anti-Semitism in the Academy: Some Pages of the Past,” Midstream 25 ( January 1979): 49–54. 36 Ibid., 49. 37 Ibid., 53–54. 38 On this point see Alexander Bloom, Prodigal Sons: The New York Intellectuals and Their World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 37. 39 Despite this threat of dismissal, Trilling was rehired for the following year. The antisemitism surrounding Trilling’s reappointment to the English Department in 1936 is discussed in Bloom, Prodigal Sons, 23; Hook, “Anti-Semitism in the Academy,” 51–53; and Diana Trilling, “Lionel Trilling: A Jew at Columbia,” Commentary 67 (March 1979): 40–46.

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the end Lewy received a temporary appointment at HUC in Cincinnati that eventually evolved into a permanent position. Lewy taught there until his death in 1963.40 Throughout 1937 and 1938 Adler also worked tirelessly to raise the necessary funds to create an academic position in America for Dr. Ismar Elbogen, one of the outstanding Jewish historians of the twentieth century. Elbogen, who had published several important works on Jewish history, including the most comprehensive study of “the Jewish worship service and its historical development” ever written,41 had been teaching since 1902 at the Lehranstalt (formerly Hochschule) für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, the liberal rabbinical seminary and school for advanced Jewish studies in Berlin. In June 1937, on Adler’s recommendation, JTS conferred an honorary Doctor of Hebrew Letters degree upon Elbogen in absentia.42 By this time, Adler was informed, Elbogen had decided to leave Germany, having found life there “insupportable”;43 Elbogen “had come to the conclusion,” Adler wrote in a letter to Felix M. Warburg, “that life in Germany was impossible for him and he wanted to migrate to America, if there was any way of it.”44 However, since he had not been a professor in a German university, he “was not in a position to be helped from the fund of the Emergency Committee of Displaced German Scholars,” as Sperber and Lewy had been.45 Moreover, US immigration law required that Elbogen be offered a paid professorship at a recognized academic institution in order to be eligible for a non-quota immigration visa into the United States.46 On the initiative of William Rosenau, a rabbi in Baltimore and a member of the HUC board of directors, a unique plan was formulated whereby Elbogen was invited to America

40 Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project,” 360; see also Samuel E. Karff, ed., Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion at One Hundred Years (Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College, 1976), 302. 41 Richard S. Sarason, “The Modern Study of Jewish Liturgy,” in The Study of Ancient Judaism: Mishnah. Midrash Siddur, ed. Jacob Neusner (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1981), 116. 42 Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, June 23, 1937, in Cyrus Adler Papers, Jewish Theological Seminary, archives 1, box 9; Adler letter to Felix Warburg, June 24, 1937 in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:331. 43 Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project,” 362; Adler letter to Morgenstern. December 7, 1937, AJA. 44 Adler letter to Felix Warburg, June 24, 1937, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:331. 45 Ibid. 46 Meyer, “The Refugee Scholars Project,” 361–362.

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as “Research Professor in the fields of Jewish and Hebrew Research.”47 He was supported by grants of $1,000 each from JTS, Dropsie College, HUC, and the Jewish Institute of Religion. While Rosenau initiated this plan, it could never have succeeded as it did without Cyrus Adler’s central role in its implementation. It was Adler who, as president of both JTS and Dropsie College, pledged half of the necessary funds and coordinated the efforts of the four schools to make the idea of the Elbogen research professorship a reality. On June 23, 1937, a few days after learning from Rosenau that Elbogen desired to leave Germany, Adler “brought up the matter of a possible research fund” for Elbogen at a meeting of the JTS Board of Governors, urging the members of the board to “give this matter consideration.”48 During the following months, he communicated frequently with Solomon M. Stroock, chairman of the JTS board, and philanthropist Felix Warburg, to ensure JTS’s contribution towards the research fellowship.49 In December 1937, Adler organized a private meeting, to which HUC President Morgenstern and Jewish Institute of Religion President Stephen S. Wise were invited, at Judge Julian Mack’s apartment in New York City, to further discuss and coordinate their joint fundraising efforts,50 as well as the nature and specifics of Elbogen’s academic appointment under the terms of the proposed fellowship.51 During this meeting, at which Morgenstern was represented by Judge Mack’s brother, who was president of the HUC board of directors, it was agreed that “the four institutions shall unite in inviting Professor Elbogen to become a research Professor, without any definition of duties, and that each institution should make itself responsible for $1000 per annum.”52 Elbogen would be at liberty to pursue his researches at whichever institution “would be most agreeable to him.”53 At Adler’s urging, the JTS board of governors immediately committed itself to allocating its share of the fellowship. When, however, the Dropsie Board of Governors had to postpone the meeting at which it would vote on its contribution, Adler personally guaranteed the contribution of 47 Ibid., 362. 48 Minutes of the Board of Directors of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, June 23, 1937, in Cyrus Adler Papers, Jewish Theological Seminary, archives 1, Box 9. 49 See, for example, Adler letter to Felix Warburg, June 24, 1937, in Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 2:331. 50 Adler letter to Morgenstern, December 9, 1937, AJA. 51 Morgenstern letter to Adler, December 13, 1937, Julian Morgenstern file, AJA. 52 Morgenstern letter to Adler, December 13, 1937, Julian Morgenstern file, AJA; and Adler letter to Julian Mack, December 21, 1937, Cyrus Adler file, AJA. 53 Adler letter to William Rosenau, April 29, 1938, Cyrus Adler file, AJA.

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behalf of the College: “I am taking the personal responsibility for $1000 a year and if the Dropsie College cannot meet it” he promised to pay it out of his own pocket.54 Through the efforts of Adler and Judge Mack, an additional $5000 was provided to cover the Elbogens’ traveling expenses, and their resettlement in America.55 Elbogen was formally invited to become “Research Professor in Jewish and Hebrew Research” on May 2, 1938, making him eligible to emigrate to the United States on a non-quota visa. The Elbogens sailed from Cherbourg on the S.S. Britannic and arrived in New York in October 1938. Elbogen was given an office at JTS, where he pursued his research and offered his assistance to other refugee scholars until his death in 1945.56 Cyrus Adler’s final years were heavily clouded by the rise of Hitler and the great tragedy that befell the Jews of Europe. He was, as Louis Finklestein has noted, greatly “distressed by the unwillingness of the powers to raise their voices in effective protest, and by the barring of so many doors to those who could escape.”57 Recognizing that European Jewry was imperiled, he did all he could personally and through the Jewish Theological Seminary and Dropsie College to aid and help resettle individual Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. This is a significant yet little known chapter of his varied public career that deserves to be remembered. More than any other American Jewish religious leader, other than Julian Morgenstern, Adler was instrumental in helping to secure academic employment and professional security for Jewish refugee scholars in America.

54 55 56 57

Ibid. Ibid. Dicker, Of Learning and Libraries, 65. Louis Finkelstein, preface to Robinson, Cyrus Adler Letters, 1:xxii. In an August 1933 interview, Adler had publicly noted that “the situation for the Jews today is more serious than in 1492, when they were expelled from Spain. At least, in those days, the Jews could be converted to Christianity. . . . They were given three months’ time within which to sell some of their belongings, and the rest of the world was open to them for colonization.” Now, he lamented, “the world is closed to the German victims of Hitlerism.” “Germany Worse than Old Spain,” Cyrus Adler interview in Jewish Ledger, August 10, 1933.

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How High the Wall? American Jews and the Church-State Debate* Introduction Since the 1940s, at least, most American Jews have conceived of religion and public life as being rigidly separate arenas. They have been, for the most part, strict separationists, committed to the proposition that the First Amendment was intended to erect a high and impregnable—an absolute—wall of separation between church and state. According to the prevailing liberal Jewish consensus, it is often assumed that Jewish survival and religious freedom are most secure where the wall separating church and state is strongest and least secure where government and religion are intertwined. For several decades, Leo Pfeffer, one of America’s foremost scholars of church-state relations, was the preeminent Jewish spokesman for this strict separationist position. Pfeffer, for many years staff attorney and director of the American Jewish Congress’s Commission on Law and Social Action, argued more church-state cases before the United States Supreme Court than any other person in American history, and did more than anyone else to shape and further the legal doctrine of church-state separationism.1 Indeed, it has been widely

*

1

“How High the Wall: American Jews and the Church-State Debate” was published in the Spring 1997 issue of Conservative Judaism. Republished by permission of the Rabbinical Assembly of America, with additions from my article “Jewish Critics of Strict Separationism,” which was published in Jews and the American Public Square: Debating Religion and Republic, ed. Alan Mittleman, Jonathan D. Sarna, and Robert Licht (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), reproduced by permission of Rowman and Littlefield, all rights reserved. On Pfeffer’s career, achievements, and legacy, see James E. Wood, Jr., ed., Religion and the State: Essays in Honor of Leo Pfeffer (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1985); and David G. Dalin, “Leo Pfeffer and the Separationist Faith,” This World 24 (Winter 1989): 136–140.

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recognized that Pfeffer’s major books, such as Church, State, and Freedom and God, Caesar and the Constitution, as well as his numerous articles and legal briefs, constitute the most “polished expression” of the strict separationist constitutional position. Moreover, during his forty-year association with the Commission on Social Action, Pfeffer was instrumental in formulating and planning Jewish communal policy on issues of religion and state, and was the “guiding spirit” of Jewish litigation in this area. The text at the heart of the church-state debate within the American Jewish community is, of course, found in the first part of the First Amendment to the Constitution, which is traditionally divided into two clauses, the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Instead of embracing the “narrow” interpretation of the Establishment Clause, Pfeffer and most other Jewish leaders consistently embrace the “broad” interpretation of the Establishment Clause espoused by the Supreme Court in its famous Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township decision of 1947, wherein it claimed, quoting the words of Thomas Jefferson, that the Establishment Clause “was intended to erect a ‘wall of separation between church and state.’” Speaking for the majority in the Everson case, Justice Hugo Black stated the “broad interpretation” of the Establishment Clause, in a famous—indeed, now classic—statement that is frequently cited by Jewish proponents of the strict separationist position, and that reads (in part) as follows: The “establishment of religion” clause of the First Amendment [said Black] means at least this: Neither a state nor the Federal Government can set up a church. Neither can pass laws which aid one religion, aid all religions, or prefer one religion over another. Neither can force or influence a person to . . . profess a belief or disbelief in any religion. . . . No tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion. Neither a state nor the Federal Government can, openly or secretly, participate in the affairs of any religious organizations or groups and vice versa. In the words of Thomas Jefferson [concluded Justice Black] the clause against the Establishment of Religion: . . . was intended to erect a “wall of separation between Church and State.”2

2

Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township, 330 U.S. I, 15 (1947).

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Pfeffer and his fellow strict separationists within the Jewish community (as within other religious groups in America), who embrace this “broad interpretation,” believe (with Justice Black) that the “intent” of the First Amendment is not merely to prevent the “establishment” of a state church, but to preclude government aid to any and all religious groups or dogmas. In addition, as Pfeffer argued in Church, State and Freedom, any and all government support for, or involvement with religion, “even on a nonpreferential basis,” violates the Establishment Clause and is thus unconstitutional.3 Reasoning that the Establishment Clause, broadly interpreted, was the best guarantor of both religious freedom and religious equality, they shared Pfeffer’s oft-quoted assumption that the Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment were “two sides of the same,” or (as it were) two separate clauses, expressing the principle “that (religious) freedom requires separation,” and that the non-establishment of religion is an end unto itself, guaranteed by the First Amendment. Beginning in 1948 with the landmark Supreme Court case of McCollum v. Board of Education,4 which ruled that released-time programs that used public school classrooms for religious instruction during regular school hours were unconstitutional, Pfeffer led an unrelenting fight against prayer and religious instruction in the public schools, state aid to parochial schools, tax exemptions for churches and synagogues, and the presence of any and all religious symbols in American public life. In the 1948 case, the McCollums challenged the constitutionality of a released-time program that used public school classrooms for religious instruction during regular school hours. Pfeffer supported their challenge in a “friend of the court” brief on behalf of the Synagogue Council of America (an umbrella organization representing Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform rabbinic and congregational groups) and the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC), which represented a wide spectrum of Jewish community relations agencies, including the American Jewish Congress, the American Jewish Committee, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The decision of the court in the McCollum case proclaimed released­time programs unconstitutional. A month after this decision, the Synagogue Council of America and NJCRAC formed a Joint Committee on Religion and the Pub3 4

Dalin, “Leo Pfeffer and the Separationist Faith,” 136–137. McCollum v. Board of Education, 333 U.S. 203 (1948). On the Jewish communal involvement with, and response to, the McCollum case, see Naomi W. Cohen, Jews in Christian America: The Pursuit of Religious Equality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 140–147; and Gregg Ivers, To Build a Wall: American Jews and the Separation of Church and State (Charlottesville, VA: The University Press of Virginia, 1995).

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lic School (later the Joint Advisory Committee on Religion and State) which, under Pfeffer’s astute guidance, formulated public statements and drafted legal briefs in opposition to released and shared time, government support for private religious schools, prayer, Bible reading, and religious observances in the public schools and the teaching of religion under the guise of “moral and spiritual values.” Like other immigrant Jews of his generation, Pfeffer had been taught by both Jewish history and his own experience to embrace strict separationism as the only defense against what they perceived to be a Christian-dominated state. For these strict separationists—and the vast majority of American Jews until the 1980s were strict separationists—it became axiomatic that any religious influence in the public institutions of Christian America impinged upon the full citizenship of Jews. Only strict separation, they believed, could ensure the kind of free society and political climate wherein Jews, and Judaism, could flourish. Pfeffer’s view that “complete separation of church and state is best for the church and best for the state, and secures freedoms for both” seemed to most American Jews to be logically consistent and historically convincing. When the Supreme Court in Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Abington Township School District v. Schempp (1963) outlawed state-composed prayers and state­sponsored Bible reading in the public schools, the overwhelming majority of American Jews applauded these decisions. Pfeffer proudly asserted in a 1966 address to the Joint Advisory Committee, “our absolutist policy has now become the supreme law of the land through a series of decisions to which our test cases, briefs and other writing contributed substantially.”

Will Herberg and Other Early Jewish Critics of Strict Separationism And yet, it is important to remember that the separationist position did not go unchallenged in the Jewish community, even in its heyday. In articles published during the 1950s and 1960s, the Jewish theologian and religious thinker Will Herberg—the author of Protestant, Catholic, Jew and other important books— began to call for a reassessment of the prevailing Jewish consensus that religion should play no role in American public life. The authors of the Constitution never intended to erect a “wall of separation,” said Herberg. The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment had been profoundly misunderstood: although the founding fathers did not want to favor any single religion, they were not against helping all religions, or all religion, equally. In drafting the Establishment

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Clause, they merely intended to prohibit the designation or establishment of any church as an official state or “national” one, and to prevent “a preference of any one religious sect or denomination” over others. “Neither in the minds of the Founding Fathers nor in the thinking of the American people through the nineteenth and twentieth century,” wrote Herberg, “did the doctrine of the First Amendment ever imply an ironclad ban forbidding the government to take account of religion or to support its various activities.”5 Herberg was especially vocal in his criticism of liberal American Jews and their insistence that religion be rigidly distinct from public life. In several articles published during the 1950s and 1960s, Herberg urged the liberal Jewish “establishment” to reassess their position. “The American Jew must have sufficient confidence in the capacity of democracy to preserve its pluralistic . . . character without any ‘absolute’ wall of separation between religion and public life,” he wrote in 1952.6 Eleven years later, frustrated by liberal Jewish support for the 1963 Supreme Court decision banning Bible reading and recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools, Herberg entered a plea for the restoration of religion to a place of honor in American public life. Writing in National Review, he said: Within the meaning of our political tradition and political practice, the promotion [of religion] has been, and continues to be, a part of the very legitimate “secular” purpose of the state. Whatever the “neutrality” of the state in matters of religion may be, it cannot be a neutrality between religion and no-religion, any more than . . . [i]t could be a neutrality between morality and no-morality, . . . [both religion and morality being] as necessary to “good government” as “national prosperity.”7

“The traditional symbols of the divine presence in our public life,” Herberg warned, “ought not to be tampered with.”8 In 1958, Rabbi Arthur Gilbert also emerged as an early and trenchant critic of the strict separationist position, voicing and reiterating some of Herberg’s

5 6

7 8

David G. Dalin, “Will Herberg in Retrospect,” Commentary 50 ( July 1988): 42. Will Herberg, “The Sectarian Conflict over Church and State: A Divisive Threat to Our Democracy?,” Commentary 14, no. 5 (November 1952): 450–462, reprinted in From Marxism to Judaism: The Collected Essays of Will Herberg, ed. David G. Dalin (New York: Markus Wiener Publishing, 1989), 209. Dalin, “Will Herberg in Retrospect,” 42. Ibid.

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earlier concerns in a major address to the annual convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. As Jonathan D. Sarna has pointed out, Gilbert, who was then the Director of Interreligious Affairs for the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, challenged his rabbinic colleagues “to rethink their kneejerk commitment to strict separationism,” and the secular bias upon which it was predicated.9 “Our record is stuck in its groove,” he warned. Attacking the Reform Movement’s unwavering opposition to religion in the schools generally, and to the use of public money to pay for the transportation of parochial-school children in particular, Gilbert called for Jewish policy positions that are formulated on religious grounds, and “that appear to be more realistic and respond in a more sophisticated fashion to the temper and needs of today’s society.”10 In so doing, Gilbert, who was then one of the preeminent figures in the American rabbinate and who would later become the founding dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, emerged as the first prominent American rabbi to become an outspoken critic of strict separationism and to voice his critique at a national rabbinic gathering. During the 1960s and 1970s, other prominent Jewish thinkers, such as Milton Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, and Professors Jakob J. Petuchowski of Hebrew Union College and Rabbi Seymour Siegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary, began to eschew their earlier liberal faith in separationism, and to develop a strong Jewish conservative argument for the desirability of greater religious involvement in American public life. While supporting state aid to parochial schools and questioning Jewish opposition to some forms of public school prayer, they (like Herberg) called for an abandonment of the Jewish separationist agenda in favor of a more pro-religion stance. Thus, writing in Commentary in 1966 on the subject of public aid to parochial schools, Himmelfarb argued: It is not true that freedom is most secure where church and state are separated. . . . Separationism is potentially tyrannical. It is harsh to those who prefer non-public schools for conscience’s sake; and it stands in the way of a more important good (and more important safeguard of Jewish security), the best possible education for all. . . . It is time that we [American Jews] actually weighed the utility and cost of education against the utility and cost of separationism. All the evidence points to education, 9

Jonathan D. Sarna, “American Jews and Church-State Relations: The Search for Equal Footing,” in Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 25. Gilbert’s address to the 1958 Convention of the Central Conference of American Rabbis is also discussed in Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 179–180. 10 Central Conference of American Rabbis Yearbook 68 (1958): 53 and 55.

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more than anything else, influencing adherence to democracy and equalitarianism. All the evidence points to Catholic parochial education having the same influence. . . . Something that nurtures a humane, liberal democracy is rather more important to Jews than twenty-four carat separationism.11

During the 1970s and 1980s, a Jewish neoconservative consensus began to emerge concerning the proper relationship between religion and politics, and the role of religious and moral values in shaping American public life. Himmelfarb, Siegel, Irving Kristol, and Murray Friedman, among others, all persuasively warned that an American moral and political culture uninformed by religious beliefs and institutions undermined the position of Jews and Judaism, and the health of a democratic society. Their concern was also shared by Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, as has been explained in detail in the Introduction to this book.12

Government Support for Day Schools and the Jewish Critique of Strict Separationism One issue that forced a reexamination of the separationist hegemony for many Jews was whether the government should give aid to parochial schools. Prior to the 1950s, the issue of government aid to parochial schools, even when addressed by the US Supreme Court, generated little interest or debate within the Jewish community. Thus, for example, the landmark case of Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (1925), in which the Supreme Court ruled unconstitutional a Ku-Klux-Klan-sponsored anti-Catholic Oregon law that sought to require all parents to send their children to public schools, did not seem to affect the majority of American Jews directly.13 Nor did the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1930 case of Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education, which permitted the State of Louisiana to lend secular textbooks to schoolchildren who attended parochial schools. Yet, Louis Marshall, a renowned constitutional lawyer and one of the leading Jewish communal leaders of the era, who

11 Milton Himmelfarb, “Church and State: How High a Wall,” Commentary 42 ( July 1966), as reprinted in his The Jews of Modernity (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 169–171. 12 See also David G. Dalin, “The Jewish Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel,” The Weekly Standard, January 4–11, 1999, 38–39. 13 Jonathan D. Sarna, American Jews and Church-State Relations: The Search for “Equal Footing” (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1989).

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represented the American Jewish Committee in its amicus curiae brief opposing Oregon’s public school law, enunciated a basic principle—the right of parents to control the education of their children and to send them to private schools— that, as Jonathan D. Sarna has noted, “made all subsequent debate possible.”14 Attacking as “an invasion of liberty” any effort to make public schools “the only medium of education in this country,” Marshall pointed out that private schools could in many cases accomplish what public schools could not—including “religion, instruction, the importance of which cannot be minimized.”15 In what has been described as the “Magna Carta of American parochial schools,” the Court overthrew the Oregon statute and established this basic right of parents to educate their children in parochial schools that Marshall had sought.16 Since there were very few Jewish day schools throughout the United States during the 1920s and 1930s, American Jewish parents did not advocate government aid for the parochial school education of their children. Still, the growth of parochial schools, Catholic and Jewish alike, during the 1940s and 1950s, coupled with heightened national concern over the quality of primary education, led to renewed pressure on behalf of state and federal measures to grant limited assistance to parochial schools on the basis of the “child benefit theory.” This idea, supported by the Supreme Court in in Cochran v. Louisiana State Board Education decision, is that state aid could be extended to parochial-school children so long as “the school children and the state alone are the beneficiaries.”17 And yet, in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s historic Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township 1947 ruling, which permitted states to fund the cost of transporting students to parochial schools, leading Jewish organizations and religious denominations, including the Orthodox, united behind the Synagogue Council of America-NCRAC policy statement broadly opposing all government aid to parochial schools.18 14 Ibid., 28. 15 Marshall’s brief is reprinted in Louis Marshall: Champion of Liberty: Selected Papers and Addresses (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1957), ed. Charles Reznikoff, 2:957–967. The historical context of Marshall’s involvement in this historic Supreme Court case is discussed in Morton Rosenstock, Louis Marshall: Defender of Jewish Rights (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965), 211–213. 16 Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 209. 17 Cochran v. Louisiana State Board of Education, 281 U.S. 370,375 (1930). 18 Sarna, American Jews and Church-State Relations, 28. On the Jewish organizational response to the Everson case, see also Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 139–140; and Ivers, To Build a Wall, 17–28.

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Beginning in the 1950s, however, demands for a reassessment of this Jewish communal policy of opposition to government support for parochial schools were increasingly heard within the American Jewish community. In 1962, as Jonathan D. Sarna has noted, the American Jewish Year Book, reviewing the events of the previous year, pointed out that “unexpectedly strong support for the Catholic position [favoring state aid to parochial schools] appeared within the Jewish community, especially among the Orthodox.”19 As the number of Jewish parochial schools began to proliferate during the 1950s and 1960s, Orthodox Jews abandoned their earlier opposition to state aid to parochial schools in the hope of obtaining funds for their own Jewish religious schools. They began to argue, as Catholics had before them, that education in a religious setting benefited not only members of their own faith, but also the nation as a whole, and that money used to support secular studies at these schools should not be denied because the schools happened to teach religious subjects on the side.20 As more and more private Jewish parochial day schools were established during the 1970s and 1980s, and as the costs of parochial school education continued to escalate, a growing number of Jewish religious leaders and intellectuals began to recognize the “justice” of the Catholic claim to public support of parochial schools, whether in the form of textbooks, bus transportation, and school lunches, or proposals for tax credits and vouchers. “In principle,” as Herberg put it, “there is no reason why the religious school should be barred from governmental support because of what is said or implied in the First Amendment.”21 In 1965, when Congress debated the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which proposed to extend $2.3 billion dollars in federal aid to the nation’s elementary and secondary schools, Rabbi Moshe Sherer testified before Congress in support of financial aid to private and parochial schools. Sherer, the executive vice president of Agudath Israel of America, argued that Jewish day schools faced “extremely difficult financial circumstances,” and that denial of tax aid to these schools would constitute “a discrimination which is not in accordance with basic American ideals.” He vigorously urged the extension of federal aid

19 Sarna, American Jews and Church-State Relations, 29. 20 Jonathan D. Sarna, “Christian America or Secular America? The Church-State Dilemma of American Jews,” in Jews in Unsecular America, ed. Richard John Neuhaus (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987), 17–18. 21 David G. Dalin, “How High the Wall? American Jews and the Church-State Debate,” Conservative Judaism (Spring 1997): 69.

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to the 251 Orthodox elementary and secondary religious schools he represented.22 He was soon joined by representatives of other Orthodox religious groups, such as the National Council of Young Israel and the Jewish Day School Organization, Torah Umesorah. Even more surprisingly, aid to parochial schools was “simultaneously endorsed” by a leading Conservative Jewish lay leader, Charles H. Silver, who was also at the time president of the New York City Board of Education.23 Also participating was the National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA), which was organized in 1965 to support aid to parochial schools and to defend the rights and interests of Orthodox Jews on other church-state matters. Dedicated to providing “legal and legislative services to Orthodox Jewish organizations and individuals, without charge, by submitting legal briefs to courts and preparing other legal materials,” COLPA effectively served as a counterweight to the legal staffs of the American Jewish Congress and other separationist agencies in litigation concerning issues of religion and state.24 In the ensuing years, COLPA has appeared as amicus curiae in numerous church-state cases before the courts, on issues ranging from the legal rights of Jewish Sabbath observers to the legal right of Jews to ask for religious symbols, such as the menorah, to be placed on public property. Jewish critics of the strict separationist position on this issue began to emerge outside the Orthodox community as well. During the early 1960s, to the surprise of many Jewish communal leaders, aid to parochial schools had been endorsed by a leading Conservative Jewish leader, Charles H. Silver, who was also at the time president of the New York City Board of Education.25 Throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s, the growth of Jewish day schools outside the Orthodox community prompted some Conservative and Reform rabbis and educators also to rethink their earlier opposition to state aid. “The time has come,” argued Rabbi Seymour Siegel of the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1970, in an argument that he (and others) would reiterate many times over the following two decades, “for the Jewish community to revise its stand . . . and to support the public officials who are in favor of state aid to all schools, including parochial schools, day schools and yeshivot”:

22 David G. Dalin, ed., American Jews and the Separationist Faith: The New Debate on Religion in Public Life (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992), 5. 23 Sarna, American Jews and Church-State Relations, 29–30. 24 Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 261–264. 25 Sarna, American Jews and Church State Relations, 26.

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There is more and more realization in the Conservative movement that the strengthening of the Day School movement is essential for the maintenance of religious life. Even the Reform movement, once positively antagonistic, seems to be opening such schools, recognizing that they are vital to Jewish survival. So Jewish parents are now more sympathetic to the plight of Catholic parents. They have been complaining that without government aid for their parochial schools they are carrying a double load of taxation and that the special financial burden of supporting children in church-related institutions constitutes, in effect, a threat to their religious freedom.26

As Jewish parochial school tuition has increased enormously in recent years, government support for private religious schools, in the form of tax credits and vouchers, has emerged as a public policy alternative that more and more Jewish leaders have begun to support.27 Jewish critics of the Jewish strict separationist position have frequently pointed out that the American Jewish community’s commitment to separationism has never been absolute. On the contrary: At the beginning of the Civil War, Jews in America, as a community, fought for the right of rabbis to serve with priests and ministers as chaplains in the armed forces.28 Today, American Jews take it for granted that rabbis can and should serve as military chaplains, whose salaries are paid by the United States government. American Jews also take it for granted that rabbis, together with priests and ministers, are invited to give prayers or benedictions at the opening of both houses of Congress and sessions of our state legislatures, and at our presidential inaugurations. They would protest vigorously if this tradition were ever abrogated. American Jews, like American Protestants and Catholics, never complained when the words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance during the 1950s, nor did they object to the fact that the words “in God We Trust” are on our currency. Moreover, despite their commitment to separationism in other areas, American Jews (with few exceptions) have staunchly opposed legal efforts to 26 Seymour Siegel, “Church and State: A Reassessment,” Sh’ma 1, no. 3 (December 11, 1970). 27 On this point, see, for example, Jacob Sullum, “Educational Choice for Parents: Vouchers Will Make More Jews,” Moment (February 1994): 38–41; and the comments by Murray Friedman, a senior official of the American Jewish Committee, in his essay in American Jews and the Separationist Faith, ed. David G. Dalin (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992), 51. 28 Bertram W. Korn, American Jewry and the Civil War (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1951), 56–97.

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challenge the constitutionality of tax exemptions for churches and synagogues. Most American Jewish leaders have, for several decades, consistently favored tax exemptions, some arguing, in fact, that to deny them would infringe upon the religious freedom of all religious groups. Such support for tax exemption is, of course, not surprising. Synagogues and churches, and the religious schools they operate, are dependent upon the exemption of their property from taxes, and the deductibility of contributions made to them, for their very survival.29 Most congregational rabbis of all denominations, even the more ardently separationist among them, agree that few synagogues could survive in today’s economic climate without tax-exempt status. As one rather astute commentator has so aptly noted: “A court decision holding tax exemptions for religious institutions unconstitutional under the establishment clause” would do for the churches and synagogues of America “what Henry VIII did for the monasteries of England.”30

School Prayer and the Jewish Critique of Strict Separationism The issues of government support for Jewish day schools and tax exemptions for synagogues and churches are only two of many issues that have forced many liberal Jews to rethink and reassess how high the so-called “wall of separation” should be. Throughout the American Jewish community in recent years, there has been a growing recognition that the triumph of strict separation as a legal doctrine, with its promise to expunge any and all religious symbols and teachings from the public arena, may actually infringe upon the free exercise of religion so cherished by American Jews. The 1986 US Supreme Court decision in Goldman v. Weinberger is illustrative of this tendency. For many religiously devout Orthodox Jews, the wearing of a small cap or head covering, called a yarmulke, is a tenet of Jewish religious faith, and a matter of Jewish religious

29 These points are developed in greater detail in my review essay, “Leo Pfeffer and the Separationist Faith,” 136–140; On the issue of tax exemptions for churches and synagogues, and their clergy, generally, see also: Leo Pfeffer, “Religious Exemptions,” in Church-State Relations: Tensions and Transitions, ed. Thomas Robbins and Roland Robenson (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1987), 103–108; Dean M. Kelly, Why Churches Should Not Pay Taxes (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); and Ronald B. Flowers, “Tax Exemptions and the Clergy: On Vows of Poverty and Parsonage Allowances,” in Religion and the State, ed. James E. Wood, Jr. (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 1985), 359–376. 30 George Goldberg, Church, State and the Constitution: The Religion Clauses Upside Down (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1987), 79.

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obligation. In this much publicized case,31 Simcha Goldman, an Orthodox Jew serving as a clinical psychologist in an Air Force hospital normally wore a yarmulke at all times. In May 1981, Goldman’s superior officer notified him that wearing a yarmulke indoors while in uniform violated an Air Force dress-code regulation on headgear, and ordered him to remove it or face a court martial. Goldman, represented by attorneys from COLPA, filed suit, claiming that this regulation infringed upon his First Amendment right to the free exercise of his religious belief. Despite the fact that every major American Jewish organization filed legal briefs in support of Goldman’s right to wear his yarmulke in public, the Supreme Court upheld the Air Force regulation. The First Amendment’s Free Exercise protection, it ruled, did not require the military to accommodate Captain Goldman’s religious obligation. Implicit to the doctrine of church-state separation that the Court enforced in this case, is the assumption that religious symbols, such as the yarmulke, while appropriate for private religious devotion in home or synagogue, have no legitimate place in any public institution, whether educational or military. For many Jews, the Supreme Court’s denial of Simcha Goldman’s free exercise of his religious obligation to wear a yarmulke was a troubling example of what the Pfefferian ideal of strict separationism had wrought. In his dissent, praised by all segments of the organized Jewish community, separationists and opponents of separationism alike, Justice William Brennan lamented the fact that “The Court and the military services have presented patriotic Orthodox Jews with a painful dilemma—the choice between fulfilling a religious obligation and serving their country.” Orthodox Jewish servicemen, noted Brennan, would now be required to violate the tenets of their faith “virtually every minute of every working day.”32 Congress subsequently enacted federal legislation to overturn Goldman v. Weinberger. Drafted by Nathan Lewin, the COLPA attorney who argued Simcha Goldman’s case before the US Supreme Court and who would later be the 31 Goldman v. Weinberger, 106 S.Ct. 1310 (1986); for discussions of this celebrated case, see Daniel D. Chazin, “Goldman v. Secretary of Defense: A New Standard for Free Exercise Claims in the Military,” National Jewish Law Review (1986): 13–40; Martin Edelman, “Goldman v. Weinberger: Yarmulkes, The Supreme Court and the Free Exercise of Religion,” The Jewish Law Annual 8 (1991): 210–220; Michael W. McConnell, “Taking Religious Freedom Seriously,” in Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court: The Cases That Define the Debate Over Church and State, ed. Terry Eastland (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1993), 503–504; and Michael J. Sandel, Democracy’s Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 69. 32 Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 279.

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attorney for Chabad in the Allegheny menorah case as well, and passed by both houses of Congress, this new law required the armed services to allow its members to wear a “neat and conservative” skull cap if it would not interfere with their duties. While the enactment of this legislation overturning Goldman v. Weinberger was a victory for COLPA and other Jewish critics of strict separationism, it was widely applauded throughout the organized Jewish community, and supported by individual Jews and Jewish organizations that, while traditionally part of the prevailing liberal Jewish consensus, were now dissenting from the strict separationist position. Also implicit to the doctrine of strict church-state separation, from which a growing number of Jewish critics have begun to dissent, is the assumption that any and all forms of school prayer, even the most innocuous and nonsectarian, are unconstitutional, a position shared by the vast majority of American Jews for many decades. Indeed, since the mid-nineteenth century, Jews had been united in their opposition to both prayer and Bible reading in the public schools. The development of the free public school system in antebellum America had coincided with the immigration to America of tens of thousands of German Jews, who had embraced the public school ideal, and whose children flocked to them in ever-increasing numbers. By the late nineteenth century, American Jews had become ardent supporters of public school education, enthusiastically embracing the opportunities and promise offered by a free, tax-supported school system open to all children, rich or poor, of all religious faiths.33 Most, however, were also uncomfortable with the fact that since their inception during the three decades prior to the Civil War, public schools in most parts of the United States had been culturally Protestant, requiring Bible reading, classroom prayers, and other devotional exercises. Jews who attended America’s public schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries vividly recalled the “Christian ambiance” of the classroom, wherein the school day often began with compulsory morning religious exercises, including reading from the Protestant King James version of the Bible, the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, the singing of hymns, and the celebration of Christian holidays such as Christmas and Easter. The state of Massachusetts and subsequently others required Bible reading and school prayer by state law, on the principle that the public schools should not be “godless” secular institutions. Believing that religion and religious instruction should 33 On this general topic, see Lloyd P. Gartner, “Temples of Liberty Unpolluted: American Jews and the Public Schools, 1840–1875,” in A Bicentennial Festschrift for Jacob Rader Marcus, ed. Betram W. Korn (New York: KTAV Publishing House, Inc., 1976), 157–189.

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remain a private matter, the province of church or synagogue, Jewish leaders opposed these practices, advocating the ideal of “unsectarian,” religiously neutral public school education, while staunchly opposing any and all sectarianism in the schools. “It is our settled opinion here,” said the prominent American rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise in the late nineteenth century, “that the education of the young is the business of the State, and that religious instruction . . . is the duty of religious bodies. Neither ought to interfere with the other.”34 Over the years, as Lloyd P. Gartner has noted, Wise’s “settled opinion” became a principle of Jewish communal ideology,35 and as a result, a Jewish consensus emerged in opposition to prayer and other manifestations of religion in the schools that would last for a century, until the 1980s.36 Thus, when the US Supreme Court, in its historic Engel v. Vitale decision, outlawed state-composed school prayers in 1962, the vast majority of American Jewish leaders supported the Court’s decision. The prayer in question was a nondenominational one composed by the New York Board of Regents and was actually approved by several Orthodox rabbis and communal leaders, some of whom publicly dissented from the widespread Jewish community’s support for Engel, and emerged as vocal critics of the Court’s strict separationist position. These included Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, the Lubavitcher Rebbe, an influential Hasidic leader, whose pronouncements carried considerable weight throughout the Orthodox Jewish world. Schneerson deplored the Court’s ruling on the grounds of “Halakhah [ Jewish law] and common sense,” as he argued that “it is necessary to engrave upon the child’s mind the idea that any wrongdoing is an offense against divine authority and order,”37 and subsequently stated that it was the duty of all Jews “committed to the Torah” to work for the reversal of Engel.38 “The crux of the problem,” Schneerson maintained, “lies in the success or failure of bringing up the children to an awareness of a Supreme Authority, who is not only to be feared, but also loved. Under existing conditions in 34 Sarna, American Jews and Church-State Relations, 19. 35 Gartner, “Temples of Liberty Unpolluted,” 177. 36 Engel v. Vitale 370 U.S. 421 (1962). Leo Pfeffer’s detailed discussion of the case can be found in Leo Pfeffer, “The New York Regents’ Prayer Case,” Journal of Church and State 4 (November 1962): 150–159; a thorough discussion and analysis of the Jewish reaction to, and communal debate over, the Supreme Court’s decision in this case can be found in Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 171–186. 37 “Letter from the Lubavitcher Rabbi (1964),” quoted in Naomi W. Cohen, “Schools, Religion and Government-Recent American Jewish Opinions,” Michael 3 (1975): 364. 38 Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 178.

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this country, a daily prayer in the public schools is for a vast number of boys and girls the only opportunity of cultivating such an awareness.”39 In a letter to the New York Times, Immanuel Jakobovitz, then the rabbi of New York City’s prestigious Fifth Avenue Synagogue and later the chief rabbi of the British Empire, strongly criticized the New York Board of Rabbis for its support of the Supreme Court’s decision in Engel, expressing his “dismay at the alliance between teachers of Judaism and the spokesmen of secularism and atheism.”40 Similarly, Michael Wyschogrod, a modern Orthodox professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, writing in the pages of the Orthodox religious journal Tradition, publicly criticized the Court’s decision in Engel, while urging the Jewish religious community to reconsider its opposition to prayer in the public schools.41 It was “in the interest of the American Jewish community,” argued Wyschogrod, “that America remain a God-fearing nation,”42 wherein Christians could recite their daily prayers and remain true to their faith. Moreover, as Naomi W. Cohen has noted,43 in making his case in support of prayer in the schools, Wyschogrod dismissed the arguments that such prayer caused emotional distress to Jewish children. On the contrary, he argued, Jewish children secure in their own religious identity and tradition would not be shocked or threatened by the religious prayers recited by their Christian classmates. Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority of American Jews applauded the Engel decision as “an affirmation of the position they had long espoused.” So too, American Jews, committed as they were to the strict separation of church and state, praised the Supreme Court’s ruling prohibiting the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer in the public schools the following year. And yet today, the Jewish consensus in opposition to any and all forms of school prayer is not as solid as it once had been. Indeed, another issue that has forced some Jews to rethink and reassess how high the so-called “wall of separation” should be is the very reasonable argument in favor of voluntary school prayer and especially a “moment of silence” for such voluntary prayer, long opposed by the organized Jewish community on strict separationist grounds. This is, of course, an issue that has been at the center of a great deal of public debate and discussion throughout the past decade and especially, in recent months. In 1984, President Reagan 39 40 41 42 43

Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 216. Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 177–178. Michael Wyschogrod, “Second Thoughts on America,” Tradition 5 (Fall 1962): 29–36. Ibid., 33. Cohen, Jews in Christian America, 182.

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supported a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court’s Engel v. Vitale decision and to permit vocal prayer in public institutions, including schools. Although the amendment was supported by fifty-six senators, it still fell eleven votes short of the two-thirds Senate majority needed for further consideration. Parenthetically, it is significant to note that the diversity of both the support for and the opposition against this proposed constitutional amendment indicated how such controversial church-state issues have, and continue to, split normal coalitions in American politics. Supporters of the proposed amendment included both liberals and conservatives (such as the liberal Senator William Proxmire of Wisconsin and Jesse Helms of North Carolina), Jews and Mormons (such as Senator Edward Zorinsky of Nebraska and the Mormon Orrin Hatch of Utah) and representatives of both the mainline and evangelical wings of Protestantism. In 1984, the forty-four Senate opponents of organized school prayers included some of the most conservative members of that body (such as Barry Goldwater of Arizona), the Senate’s only clergyman ( John Danforth of Missouri, an ordained Episcopal priest), and one of its most prominent evangelical spokesmen (Mark Hatfield of Utah). More recently, the new speaker of the House of Representatives, Georgia’s Congressman, Newt Gingrich, called for a vote by July 4, 1995 on a constitutional amendment that would restore some form of public school prayer and the previous November, President Bill Clinton stunned many Democrats when he suggested that a properly crafted measure might gain his support. Several states and the District of Columbia are also considering measures to restore some form of voluntary school prayer—especially non-sectarian student-led prayer at school activities—and these measures are gaining some unanticipated Jewish support. While a majority of Jews still oppose vocal, organized school prayer, a growing number of American Jews now support voluntary silent prayer. Many of these Jews find it difficult to understand why so many Jewish leaders and Jewish communal organizations persist in their long-standing position of opposition to any and all forms of school prayer, including voluntary, non-sectarian, student­led prayer, silent meditation and “moments of silence” in the classroom. At least some Jewish communal leaders and political figures have begun to publicly question this position, especially since the 1985 Supreme Court decision, in the case of Wallace v. Jaffree, that ruled, on strict separationist grounds, that an Alabama law authorizing one minute of daily silence “for meditation or voluntary prayer” was unconstitutional. Such a statute requires no one to pray, and establishes no official prayer. Many Jews agreed with the dissenting opinion of Justice Sandra Day O’Connor who said that “she could not discern a threat to religious liberty from a room of silent,

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thoughtful schoolchildren.” Nor, contrary to what some Jewish leaders have suggested, does such a statute seem to be a subterfuge for the introduction of sectarian, Christological school prayers that Jewish children would find offensive. Rather, it seems to be an entirely reasonable attempt to accommodate the potential desire of students, Jewish and non-Jewish, for the free exercise of their religion in schools that they are compelled to attend. Many Jews—indeed, many Jewish communal leaders—now feel that “the passage of such a law permitting silent prayers would be an important gesture to affirm freedom of religious expression and to signal that it is okay to be religious if you desire.” One especially recent school prayer case, Lee v. Weisman, decided by the Supreme Court in 1992,44 has forced a vocal minority of American Jews to rethink and reassess the once-traditional liberal Jewish consensus against any and all public school prayer, as well as the more general question of how high or “absolute” the “wall of separation” should be. The case arose in Providence, Rhode Island, where middle and high school principals regularly invited members of the city’s clergy to give invocation and benediction prayers as part of their school’s graduation ceremonies. In June 1989, Leslie Gutterman, the rabbi of a Providence synagogue, delivered a nonsectarian prayer at the eighth-grade graduation of one of the city’s middle schools, “praising God for the legacy of America where diversity is celebrated and the rights of minorities are protected” and for “its court system where all can seek justice.” His prayer was challenged by Daniel Weisman and his daughter Deborah, a member of the middle school’s graduating class, who sued the Providence School Board, arguing that Rabbi Gutterman’s commencement benediction violated the Supreme Court’s 1962 (Engel v. Vitale) ban on public school prayer. In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court agreed, stating that graduation ceremony benedictions, such as Gutterman’s, however innocuous and nonsectarian, were unconstitutional, and explaining that its ban on graduation prayers and benedictions in this case was a logical extension of three decades of court decisions (since Engel) regarding organized prayer in the public schools. Many Jewish leaders found the Supreme Court’s decision, as well as the case itself, both ironic and puzzling. After all, Jewish opposition to school prayer had traditionally been predicated upon a concern about openly Christological prayers, offered by Christian clergy, that Jewish children would 44 Lee v. Weisman, 112 Sup. Ct. 2649 (1992); see also Eastland, Religious Liberty in the Supreme Court, 439–467; Leonard W. Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, 2nd rev. ed. (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1994), 200– 204; and Samuel Rabinove, “Weisman’s Complaint,” Reform Judaism (Fall 1991): 38–39; Samuel Rabinove was the legal director of the American Jewish Committee.

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be compelled to listen to and recite. It struck many American Jews as highly ironic that a Jewish family, such as the Weismans, would go to court to stop a rabbi from delivering the most innocuous of nonsectarian prayers that could not possibly have offended any of the Jewish—or, for that matter, Christian— children in attendance. In what possible way, they asked, could such a nonsectarian prayer delivered by a rabbi pose a threat to the religious freedom of American Jews?

Menorahs and Yarmulkes: Religious Symbols in the Public Square Yet another controversial issue that has forced many Jews to rethink and reassess high how the “wall of separation” should be has revolved around the unbending efforts of liberal Jewish organizations to keep religious symbols, such as the crèche and menorah, outside the public arena. Most liberal Jewish organizations had long opposed the public display of crèches on government property, arguing that such displays amounted to an impermissible establishment of religion. And yet, while most of these liberal Jewish organizations opposed the Supreme Court’s 1984 decision, in the controversial case of Lynch v. Donnelly, affirming the constitutional right of local municipalities to erect a crèche or nativity scene as part of its annual Christmas celebrations, a vocal minority of Jews did not disapprove of Christmas displays on public property, and applauded this decision. They found nothing wrong or inappropriate about the public display of any religious symbols, Christian or Jewish. Their dissent from the prevailing liberal Jewish consensus opposing such public displays was encouraged, in part, by the vigorous campaign of the Chabad (Lubavitch) organization, an independent Orthodox Hasidic movement, begun in the late 1970s, to construct privately funded Hanukkah menorahs on public property in cities throughout the United States, which had precipitated a heated debate within the American Jewish community over whether it was constitutionally permissible and proper to do so. The head of the Lubavitch movement, Rabbi Schneerson, who died in 1994, functioned as perhaps the most respected and authoritative Orthodox Jewish critic of the strict separationist position. The issue, as popularly understood, involved a basic question: should the public square be devoid of any religious symbols, or should it be open to all religious symbols, including the crèche and the menorah?45 Liberal Jewish orga45 Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 288–289.

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nizations, such as the American Jewish Congress and the Reform Movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, have staunchly opposed the placing of menorahs (as well as crèches) on public property, as an impermissible breach of the “wall of separation.” Opponents of public menorah displays viewed them as a violation of the Establishment Clause, arguing that “the kindling of huge menorahs in public places across America opens a dangerous constitutional can of worms,”46 and that “since there is no religious need to place sacred symbols of any faith on public property,” there is no religious need to be accommodated by government.47 Proponents of these displays, such as Rabbi Schneerson and the attorneys for COLPA, saw them as an expression of the very neutrality with regard to all religions that the First Amendment was enacted to guarantee. Orthodox Jewish groups, such as Chabad and COLPA, argued that Jews have a legal right to ask for menorahs to be placed on public property, especially alongside the permissible symbols of Christmas. In a 1978 letter to Rabbi Schneerson, Rabbi Joseph Glazer, then the executive vice president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, voiced his opposition to the Lubavitch campaign to erect menorahs on government property, calling it “as much a violation of the constitutional principle of separation of church and state as is the erection of Christmas trees and crèches depicting the birth of Jesus. It weakens our hand when we protest this intrusion of Christian doctrine into the public life of American citizens.”48 In his reply, Rabbi Schneerson tried to “allay” Glazer’s “apprehensions.” After presenting an alternative understanding of the First Amendment, and reminding Rabbi Glazer in effect that the American Jewish community’s commitment to separationism has never been absolute, he emphasized that the Lubavitch organization placed menorahs on public property to encourage Jewish religious identity and observance (“Torah and Mitzvoth”) as well as Jewish religious pride. Doing so increased the likelihood that the mitzvah of kindling Hanukkah menorahs would be fulfilled by all Jews. “Where Hanukkah lamps were kindled publicly,” he wrote, “the results have been most gratifying in terms of spreading the light of Torah

46 Alan Nadler, “Lubavitchers Setting Fire to Wall of Separation,” in Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 290–300. 47 Dalin, “How High the Wall?,” 76. 48 Letter from Rabbi Joseph Glazer to Rabbi Menachem Schneerson, April 25, 1978, reprinted in Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 290–291.

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and Mitzvoth, and reaching out to Jews who could not otherwise have been reached.”49 Recently, moreover, as part of the changing debate generated by the Supreme Court case Allegheny County, City of Pittsburgh, and Chabad v. ACLU,50 the traditional opposition to the public display of religious symbols has been countered by a growing demand for “equal time” for the display of specifically Jewish religious symbols in the public square. This 1989 case, in which the Supreme Court ruled that a Chabad-sponsored menorah standing next to a Christmas tree in front of Pittsburgh’s City Hall did not violate the First Amendment, forced many Jews to reexamine their earlier opposition to the placing of Hanukkah menorahs in front of a public building or within a public park, and their earlier assumption that Jews have no legal right to ask for the public display of menorahs in the public square. In the decade since the Supreme Court’s ruling, in the Allegheny case, a growing number of Jews have been swayed by the arguments of Orthodox Jewish critics of separationism that such a legal right does indeed exist. Where religious symbols of differing faiths—for example, the Hanukkah menorah and the Christmas tree—are displayed side by side, as in the Allegheny case, say these critics, the government is not favoring one religion but rather is expressing equal respect for all religions. Promoting harmony amongst religious groups, they contend, is profoundly different from the “establishing” of one religion that the First Amendment seeks to protect us from. By giving a Jewish religious display “equal time” with a Christian one, Pittsburgh was showing the very neutrality with regard to all religions that the First Amendment was enacted to guarantee. Moreover, as Nathan Lewin, the attorney for Chabad in the Allegheny case, has argued, public displays of a menorah symbolize to all the fact “that America is a country where Jews are welcome and are first-class citizens,” and “engender emotions of pride and confidence among Jews who see them.” Banishing menorahs from public places, he and other proponents of public menorah displays contend, would mean “derogating religion and denying

49 Letter from Rabbi Menachem Schneerson to Rabbi Joseph Glazer, 3 Sivan 5738, reprinted in Sarna and Dalin, Religion and State, 292–294. 50 Allegheny County, City of Pittsburgh and Chabad v. ACLU, 492 U.S. 573 (1989). The Allegheny case, and the general public debate it precipitated, are discussed in Levy, The Establishment Clause, 207–212; and Michael McGough, “Menorah Wars,” The New Republic, February 5, 1990, 12–14.

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to Jews the equal access to public forums that are available to secular organizations.”51

Conclusion No longer can it be said, as it could in the 1940s and 1950s, that American Jewry speaks with one “official” voice on the issues of religion and public life. To be sure, a number of American Jewish leaders remain wedded to a strict separationist position on most, if not all, issues concerning religion and state. But a growing, and increasingly vocal, minority of American Jews seem uncomfortable with at least some aspects of the strict separationist position, dissenting publicly from the liberal Jewish consensus that Jewish survival and religious freedom are most secure where the wall separating religion and state is strongest. And several seem to share the post-separationist faith of Rabbi Walter Wurzberger, first espoused more than a decade ago,52 and reiterated in a recently published essay, that in place of “excessive preoccupation with the Establishment Clause,” greater attention should be given to the free exercise claims of religiously observant Jews and other religious believers within American society. Instead of “clamoring for an impenetrable wall of separation,” argues Wurzberger, “we should concentrate upon protecting the Free Exercise Clause, thus insuring that unpopular religious practices, such as accommodating Sabbath observers and serving kosher food in public institutions, will be safeguarded.”53 A growing number of American Jews seem to have rejected the secular liberal view that the interests of American Jews, and American Judaism, are best served by what Richard Neuhaus has called “the naked public square,” one that is morally neutral and from which religious beliefs and values have been expunged. They think that religion has a legitimate place in American public life, that the Constitution does not embody what Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg once described as “a brooding and pervasive devotion to the secular and a passive, or even active hostility to the religious.” Such views, though they cannot be said to represent a mainstream Jewish consensus, command greater intellectual force and weight than ever before. 51 Nathan Lewin, “Making a Case for Menorahs on Public Property,” The Jewish Press, November 22, 1991, 92. 52 Walter S. Wurzberger, “Separation of Church and State Revisited,” Face to Face 8 (Fall 1981): 8. 53 See Walter S. Wurzberger’s essay in American Jews and the Separationist Faith, ed. David G. Dalin (Washington, DC: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1992), 149.

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Jews, Nazis, and Civil Liberties* Until the beginning of the 1970s, it could be argued that the concern of some Jewish community leaders for the position of Jews in the United States was exaggerated. Antisemitism had largely disappeared in the years following World War II. Reaction to the atrocities of the Nazi era was such that even mildly antisemitic public utterances came to be viewed as unacceptable. The civic status of American Jews seemed more secure than ever before. This “Golden Age” in American Jewish life has come to an end. American Jews have been experiencing a growing anxiety over various developments in the last decade, including the growth of Black Power, the emergence of quotas in employment and education, and the growth of Arab influence in the United States. The political climate of the country is clearly changing; there appears to be a growing indifference to Jewish concerns. Jews see themselves faced with new threats to their security. Adding to the renewed sense of insecurity has been the much-publicized activities of neo-Nazi groups, activities which the Jewish community has been unable to halt. While few in number,1 the Nazis, evoking nightmarish memories of the Holocaust, have sent a shudder through American Jewry. The progenitor of Nazism as we know it in the United States today is the American Nazi party, founded in 1959 by George Lincoln Rockwell. From his national headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, Rockwell controlled a small, but active, organization with units in Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Boston, Dallas, and elsewhere. By the time of his assassination by a disgruntled Nazi party member in August 1967, Rockwell had become the “Fuehrer” of American Nazism.

* 1

“Jews, Nazis and Civil Liberties” was published in American Jewish Year Book 80 (1980). Reprinted by permission of the Jewish Publication Society of America. Total Nazi membership in the United States in 1977 was between 1,500 and 2,000. There were probably no more than twenty activists each in Chicago and San Francisco. See Milton Ellerin, “Intergroup Relations,” American Jewish Year Book 79 (1979): 117.

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Following Rockwell’s death, a brief but intense leadership struggle took place, with a Milwaukee native, Matt Koehl, emerging as the head of the National Socialist White Peoples’ party. (This name had been selected by Rockwell prior to his assassination as being more American and therefore more acceptable.) In 1970 several former Rockwell aides broke away from Koehl to form their own local Nazi groups. Among these men were Allen Lee Vincent, who founded the National Socialist White Workers party (NSWWP) in San Francisco, and Frank Collin, who organized the National Socialist Party of America (NSPA) near Marquette Park, on Chicago’s South Side. In the spring of 1977, it was Collin and Vincent who orchestrated the American Nazi movement’s most publicized activities, when the former announced plans for a Nazi march through the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie, Illinois and the latter opened a Nazi bookstore across the street from a synagogue in San Francisco. This article will focus on events in Skokie and San Francisco. In both cities the immediate targets of Nazi provocation were groups of Jewish survivors who had settled in the United States in the aftermath of the Holocaust. These Jews viewed the reappearance of the swastika in their midst as a direct threat to both American democracy and Jewish survival. Jews throughout the United States were outraged by the Nazi activities. Events in Skokie and San Francisco, as well as other manifestations of neoNazism, have posed a painful dilemma for the American Jewish community. On the one hand, there has been a growing consensus among American Jews that Nazism, in any form, must not be allowed to reassert itself, and that the earlier Jewish communal strategy of ignoring the activities of virulently antisemitic groups is inappropriate and outdated. “Never Again” is no longer the slogan of the militant Jewish Defense League alone; as a response to the growing Holocaust consciousness of American Jewry, it is becoming the anti-Nazi rallying cry of the organized Jewish community as a whole. On the other hand, American Jews have traditionally been staunch supporters of civil liberties, including the right to free speech and expression. In a major public opinion study conducted in 1954, Samuel Stouffer found that Jews were far more supportive of civil liberties than were members of other religious or ethnic groups.2 This continues to be the case today, as both Everett Carl Ladd,

2

Samuel Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1955), 143. See also Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), 187–190.

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Jr.3 and Alan Fisher4 have noted. The civil libertarian propensities of American Jews have resulted in a disproportionate Jewish involvement in the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), an organization traditionally committed to protecting and defending the First Amendment rights of all groups, including American Nazis.5 In the public debate over defending the rights of Nazis, many American Jews have been torn between their commitment to the principle of unfettered freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment, and their anguished memory of the Holocaust. This has led them to rethink the meaning of the First Amendment, and the extent of their support of the ACLU. The First Amendment, many Jews now maintain, is not absolute. The public display of the swastika in a community of Holocaust survivors, they assert, constitutes a provocative act that goes far beyond the right to freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment. During the past two years, thousands of American Jews have resigned in protest from the ACLU. The anger of many Jews over the ACLU role in Skokie cannot be separated from their unhappiness with the general drift of ACLU policy in the last decade-a drift characterized by growing politicization, radical liberalism, and indifference to Jewish concerns. Whereas in the past most Jews supported liberal causes, including free speech for Nazis, even when they seemed to threaten Jewish interests and security, this is no longer the case.

Skokie and San Francisco Skokie On April 27, 1977, the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union agreed to go to court on behalf of Frank Collin, who was seeking to organize 3

4 5

Everett Carll Ladd, Jr., “Jewish Life in the United States: Social and Political Values,” paper delivered at YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Colloquium, New York City, May 28–29, 1978, 31–32. Alan Fisher, “Continuity and Erosion of Jewish Liberalism,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly (December 1976): 33–34. Various explanations have been put forward to account for Jewish support for civil liberties. Some have pointed to Jewish religious values derived from biblical and Talmudic antecedents as the source. Charles S. Liebman has suggested that Jewish liberalism in general, and the Jewish commitment to civil liberties in particular, is rooted “in the search for a universalistic ethic to which a Jew can adhere but which is seemingly irrelevant to specific Jewish concerns.” See Charles Liebman, The Ambivalent American Jew (Philadelphia, PA: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1973), 135–159.

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a Nazi march through the predominantly Jewish suburb of Skokie. Attorneys for the Village of Skokie had just filed a petition against Collin in the Cook County Circuit Court requesting an injunction to prevent him from organizing the march. Collin claimed that his constitutional rights were being threatened and asked the ACLU to aid him in his legal defense. A month earlier Collin and his followers had written to the Village of Skokie Park District seeking permission to hold a public rally in the Village park. The trustees of the Park District wrote back informing the Nazis that an insurance requirement for a rally was in force; Collin would have to produce $350,000 in insurance before a permit to hold the rally could be obtained. Since the Nazis were unable to pay this insurance requirement, the permit was refused. To protest the Skokie Park District’s requirement of insurance for permits, Collin announced that he and his followers planned to march down the streets of Skokie in full Nazi attire. Skokie, a middle-class community north of Chicago, has a population of 69,000, approximately 40,000 of whom are Jews. Of these 40,000, about 7,000 are estimated to be Holocaust survivors. It has been said that there are more former concentration camp inmates living in Skokie than in any other single community in the United States. Thus, as Chicago Congressman Abner Mikva pointed out,6 Skokie is more than a village that happens to be a part of suburban America. Its uniqueness lies not so much in its claim to be the world’s largest village, but in the fact that it is a “sanctuary for thousands of Jewish Americans who still bear the scars of Hitler’s Germany.” For many of these people, the sense of community that they have been able to share has provided important emotional security. It is not surprising that the ACLU defense of the Nazis aroused a strong reaction among the Jewish residents of Skokie. Frank Collin freely admitted that he and his followers deliberately chose to march “where our concept of white power is most opposed.” In doing so, the Nazis hoped to precipitate a violent counterdemonstration, thus making themselves martyrs, and generating wide media attention. Collin compared his strategy to that of the civil rights protestors of the 1960s. Others have noted a similarity between this tactic and that of Great Britain’s National Front, which deliberately targeted London’s heavily Jewish East End as the site for antisemitic rallies. A spokesman for the Jewish United Fund and Welfare Federation of Metropolitan Chicago ( JUF) called the Nazi plan “a deliberate and calculated” affront to the Jewish community 6

Abner Mikva, “Skokie is Different,” Moment ( June 1978): 43.

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of Chicago, an undisguised effort to provoke a violent confrontation. The residents of Skokie filed suit in Circuit Court to obtain an injunction against Collin, contending that even a few jack-booted storm troopers waving swastika flags in their streets threatened imminent violence. The legal battle7 over the proposed Nazi march in Skokie—initially scheduled for May 1 and subsequently rescheduled for July 4—officially began on April 28, 1977, when Circuit Court Judge Joseph M. Wosik imposed an injunction banning the march. On April 29 the Appellate Court of Illinois rejected the Nazi petition to temporarily lift the injunction while Collin and his followers, with the aid of the ACLU, endeavored to appeal the legality of the ban in the courts. While the ACLU appeal on behalf of the Nazis with regard to the Skokie injunction was pending, the Village of Skokie enacted three new ordinances designed to ensure that the Nazis would not be able to march regardless of the outcome of the case. One ordinance required a permit, issued by Village officials, for street or sidewalk parades. In order to obtain such a permit, the applicant had to provide thirty-day advance notice and payment of $350,000 in liability insurance against any possible damage. A second ordinance banned the public display of symbols offensive to the community and political rallies or parades in which participants wore “military style” uniforms. A third ordinance banned the dissemination of literature that might “incite or promote hatred against persons of Jewish faith or ancestry” or against persons of any other race or religion, or which in any way constituted “group libel.” Once again, the ACLU entered the case on the side of the Nazis. During the same period, Skokie resident Sol Goldstein instituted, with the legal assistance of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, a class action suit seeking a permanent injunction against the Nazis, claiming that he and his fellow Holocaust survivors in the community would suffer “severe emotional distress” and “psychic” harm if the march were held. Goldstein’s attorney, Jerome Torshen, argued that “menticide” could create emotional damage every bit as injurious as physical assault. The ACLU, again representing the Nazis, demanded that Goldstein’s suit be dismissed, on the grounds that if speech or other expression that was emotionally painful to individuals or abhorrent to the 7

The narrative of events in Skokie is developed from a number of sources: Marc Stern, “The Dilemma of Skokie: Protecting Civil Liberties or Curbing the Nazis?,” research report, Institute of Jewish Affairs, London, August 1978, 3–6; David Hamlin, “Swastikas and Survivors: Inside the Skokie-Nazi Free Speech Case,” Civil Liberties Review (March–April 1978): 8–33; and selected Jewish Telegraphic Agency Daily News Bulletins, 1977 and 1978.

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majority were suppressed little would be left of the freedom of expression protected under the First Amendment.8 While the Illinois Supreme Court subsequently ordered, without the benefit of full written or oral arguments, the dismissal of the Goldstein class action suit, it stayed the order so as to allow Goldstein time to petition the United States Supreme Court for a review of the decision.9 The Nazis, announcing that they would not march until all legal obstacles had been eliminated, then called off their July 4 demonstration. Prior to the cancellation of the Nazi rally, the organized Jewish community of metropolitan Chicago had begun to organize itself to combat the Nazis. A special Subcommittee on Individual Liberty and Jewish Security of the Public Affairs Committee (PAC) of JUF was established to formulate a community response. The chairman of the subcommittee was Sol Goldstein, who, in addition to having instituted the above-mentioned class action suit, was a former president of the Skokie Holocaust Survivors Association. “There is no room in my backyard for such a demonstration,” stated Goldstein. “I went through the Holocaust . . . and I thought the war was the end of the Nazi movement.” Goldstein and his neighbors in Skokie, active in the newly formed PAC subcommittee, argued that the First Amendment “can only be stretched so far.” Nazism, he stated, “is an idea the whole civilized world has condemned. When the First Amendment was introduced, they never thought of such a thing as genocide.”10 During the next year, Goldstein and his neighbors played a prominent role in Jewish communal decision-making vis-à-vis the Nazis. With the threatened July 4 Nazi march called off, PAC, in an effort to reduce tensions, cancelled a scheduled counterdemonstration at a Jewish community center in Skokie. Against the wishes of the PAC leadership, however, the militant Jewish Defense League ( JDL) went ahead with its own plans to hold a protest rally in Skokie on July 4. Speaking at the rally, Rabbi Meir Kahane, the JDL leader, exhorted a crowd of about 400 to “kill Nazis now.” The JDL held its rally in the parking lot of the Jewish Community Center after having been refused permission to use the building. Sol Goldstein denounced the JDL for stirring up fears that the Nazis would eventually win their ongoing court battle to march. Rabbi Lawrence Montrose of the Skokie Central Traditional Congregation, the unofficial chaplain of the Village’s death camp survivors, agreed with Goldstein, 8 9

Stern, “The Dilemma of Skokie,” 3. The US Supreme Court subsequently refused to review the Illinois Supreme Court’s dismissal, thus upholding the lower court’s decision in the Goldstein suit. 10 Kathryn McIntyre, “One Man’s War with Nazis,” US Magazine, April 18, 1978, 56.

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stating that, although he wanted to confront the Nazis with a “good strong protest,” he was opposed to the violent tactics of the Jewish Defense League. By their actions, Montrose argued, the JDL made it more difficult to forge unity within the Jewish community and to form an anti-Nazi coalition with non-Jewish groups. The court battle over the Nazis’ right to march in Skokie continued for more than a year—through June 1978. On March 17, 1978, Judge Bernard M. Decker of the Federal District Court in Chicago ordered a forty-five-day ban on the proposed march, to allow Skokie officials time to appeal his earlier ruling holding the three anti-Nazi ordinances unconstitutional. On April 2 the Federal Court of Appeals in Chicago upheld the Decker ruling prohibiting the Nazis from marching before May. However, on April 6 the Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the District Court decision and set aside the forty-five-day stay, stating that there was no reason for such a postponement since it intended to decide promptly on the constitutionality of the three Skokie ordinances. On May 22 the Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Skokie ordinances were unconstitutional. Skokie officials then appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court, which, on June 12, turned down the Village’s request for an indefinite postponement of the June 25 march. At the same time, two anti-Nazi bills that had been introduced in the Illinois State Legislature were defeated in the House after being passed in the Senate. The march in Skokie, it seemed, would go on. On May 31 the Village of Skokie Council had issued a permit to PAC to stage a counterdemonstration in Skokie on June 25. Plans were announced for providing facilities for 50,000 demonstrators. PAC allocated $100,000 to underwrite expenses, including the hiring of staff to administer and coordinate all related activities in Skokie. Eugene DuBow, on leave from his position as Midwest regional director of the American Jewish Committee, became the coordinator of the project, working closely with Goldstein and members of the PAC subcommittee. Goldstein announced that after discussions with Skokie officials, PAC had accepted the athletic field of Niles Township East as the site for the Jewish community’s counterdemonstration. A broad-based coalition of Jewish and non-Jewish groups made plans to participate in the demonstration. The American Federation of Jewish Fighters, Camp Inmates, and Nazi Victims announced that it would send busloads of its members to Skokie; it publicly urged other Jewish organizations to do likewise. Marvin Morrison, executive director of the New York department of the Jewish War Veterans, sent mailgrams to 100,000 JWV members urging them to be in Skokie on June 25. Congressmen from both major parties announced their

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intention to join in the anti-Nazi march. Support was also received from labor, veteran, and ethnic groups, among them Polish Catholic army veterans who had fought against the Nazis in World War II. An ad hoc coalition of forty-three Chicago-area ethnic groups, including Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, announced strong support for the anti-Nazi demonstration. Julian E. Kulas, local Ukrainian community leader and spokesman for the coalition, announced that it would stand by the Jews of Skokie “in order to make it crystal clear that Nazism is a threat not only to Jews but to all Americans.”11 The twenty-five-member planning committee coordinating “Project Skokie” included James Rottman, director of the National Conference of Christians and Jews, and several Christian clergymen from the Skokie area. The committee issued a call to religious leaders to support the march and to condemn Nazism as contrary to the Judeo-Christian tradition and the ideals of American democracy. Sister Ann Gillen, executive director of the National Interreligious Task Force on Soviet Jewry, convened a meeting of Chicago-area Catholic leaders that pledged “persistent action” against the Nazis in Chicago and elsewhere. An editorial in the April issue of St. Anthony’s Messenger, a national Catholic magazine, urged Christians throughout the United States to don the yellow Star of David that Jews had been forced to wear during the Nazi era, as a way of protesting the march. Groups of evangelical Christians planned to travel to Skokie to join the protest as well. A few days before the June 25 Nazi march, Collin announced that his group was cancelling its planned demonstration in Skokie and would march instead in the racially mixed area of Marquette Park. This change in strategy was attributable, ostensibly, to a ruling by a federal judge ordering the Chicago Park District to allow the Nazis to hold a rally in Marquette Park without being forced to pay the $60,000 liability insurance—reduced from an earlier $350,000, required by the district. Marquette Park, Collin now claimed, had been his original target area all along. “My overall goal always was Marquette Park, speaking to my own white people rather than a mob of howling creatures in the streets of Skokie.” Few believed him, however, assuming rather that the Nazis had been scared away by the specter of 50,000 counterdemonstrators. PAC called off its counterdemonstration shortly after the Nazis announced cancellation of their plans. When the Nazi rally was held in Marquette Park on July 9, anti-Nazi demonstrators, largely unorganized, were kept two blocks away, and no violence erupted.

11 Chicago Sun Times, June 20, 1978, 12.

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San Francisco Five days before the beginning of Passover 1977, Rabbi Theodore Alexander of Congregation B’nai Emunah, a small synagogue composed mainly of Holocaust survivors, in the predominantly middle-class Sunset district of San Francisco, arrived at his office to find that a Nazi bookstore had opened across the street. To mark the opening of the store, named after Hitler confidant Rudolf Hess, the Nazis erected a swastika in front of the building and displayed a picture of Hess, other Nazi insignia, and anti­Jewish posters in the store window. Several days later, an angry crowd of Jews armed with sledgehammers and crowbars ransacked and destroyed the bookstore. A few hours later, five stained glass windows at Congregation B’nai Emunah were smashed, apparently as an act of retaliation. Morris Weiss, a Holocaust survivor, and his son Allan were subsequently arrested for leading the assault on the Nazi store. The bookstore incident was by no means the first in which local Nazis were the cause of public confrontation and controversy. Since early 1974 the San Francisco chapter of the National Socialist White People’s Party, of which Alan Vincent was the leader, had been disrupting public meetings of the San Francisco Board of Education. The Nazis had organized several rallies at public sites at which virulently antisemitic literature was distributed. Moreover, a local cause célèbre had developed around Sandra Silva, an avowed Nazi who was employed as a clerk-typist in the San Francisco Police Department. On one side of the debate in the Silva case was the ACLU, supported by San Francisco Mayor Joseph Alioto, which strongly defended Silva’s constitutional right to “maintain her belief ” without jeopardizing her job. On the other side were a number of Jewish and Black groups, led by Jewish city supervisor Quentin Kopp,12 which argued that Silva’s anti-democratic beliefs did conflict with the performance of her job. At first, the possibility was raised that she might be dismissed on the basis of her Nazi ideology alone. But that debate ended when the San Francisco Civil Service Commission came to Silva’s defense, stating that her party affiliation did not interfere with her performance at work.13 A subsequent public furor developed over the question whether Silva had violated a Civil Service residency law requiring city employees to live in the city and might, therefore, be subject to dismissal. This was the argument of Supervisor Kopp, who claimed that he had hard evidence from several sources, 12 Kopp is a former member of the ACLU. He resigned in protest over the organization’s growing politicization. Interview with Quentin Kopp, April 24, 1978. 13 New York Times, August 4, 1974, 37.

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including a private investigator, that Silva had been living in San Mateo. Kopp asked the Civil Service Commission to institute dismissal proceedings against her. Following Kopp’s request, the ACLU came to Silva’s defense. Ruth Jacobs, an attorney with the local ACLU and the wife of radical author-activist Paul Jacobs, charged that Kopp was raising a totally irrelevant issue—that is, the residency rule—“in an attempt to deprive Silva of her right to free speech under the First Amendment.” The ACLU maintained that Silva was “temporarily” residing with her parents in San Mateo and was therefore not in violation of the city’s residency requirement. “If Kopp feels that she should be fired because of political beliefs,” suggested Jacobs, “it is his privilege to pursue that unlawful course. But he should not use the dubious device of questioning her residency. What Kopp is attempting through this investigation is to punish Miss Silva, by having her fired, for exercising her First Amendment rights.”14 In response, Kopp charged that the ACLU had “smeared me in exactly the fashion used by Joe McCarthy 20 years ago by ascribing false motives to my actions,” and that “the ACLU’s statement showed a lack of knowledge of the city’s residency law and how it applies to Miss Silva. . . . I’m not depriving her of free speech, but acting in response to complaints from constituents who believe the [residency] law should be enforced.”15 The opening of the Rudolf Hess bookstore, housed ironically in a building owned by a Jewish survivor of Auschwitz, caused great public outrage. “San Francisco is one of the nation’s most tolerant cities,” editorialized the San Francisco Examiner, “but a terminal point was reached when a group of American Nazis tried to revive Hitlerism with all its horrors. . . . The ransacking and burning of the store was inevitable. . . .”16 Reacting to the incident, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously passed a resolution urging the introduction of a bill in the state legislature to outlaw public display of the swastika and the wearing of Nazi uniforms. (Three years earlier, the Board of Supervisors had failed in an attempt to ban the wearing of a Nazi uniform in public.) Introduced by Supervisor Dianne Feinstein (who in November 1978 had become mayor), the resolution stated: “The Board of Supervisors is of the opinion that the wearing of the Nazi uniform and the display of the Nazi swastika will continue to provoke acts of violence and fear for the public safety.”17 Supervisor Feinstein 14 15 16 17

San Francisco Examiner, July 16, 1974, 1. San Francisco Chronicle, July 18, 1974, 3. San Francisco Examiner, April 5, 1977, 26. San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, May 13, 1977, 5.

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went further in voicing public sympathy for those who destroyed the bookstore: “I conceivably could have done the same thing if it had been in my neighborhood,” she said. “In Nazi Germany the same things existed and people laughed. Then suddenly the Nazis were in power.”18 Feinstein’s sentiments were echoed in statements by Rabbi Alexander and other leaders of the Jewish community. “I’ve heard that it would impair the right of free speech and the right of free assembly,” noted Rabbi Alexander in urging passage of the bill. “I’ve heard it should not be voted and should not be passed. . . . But when they dispense hate against other Americans, that can no longer fall under the right of free expression. It becomes an entirely different story. It is no longer political. It becomes incitement to hatred and murder.”19 With the help of the Jewish Community Relations Council ( JCRC), the landlord of the building housing the bookstore obtained legal counsel to have the Nazis evicted. The basis of the eviction order was misrepresentation, and they were given until April 15 to vacate the premises. At the same time, friends of the Weiss family hired attorney Ephraim Margolin to represent Morris and Allan Weiss.20 (They also organized a legal defense fund, the Sunset Anti-Fascist Committee, to raise the money needed to cover the Weisses’ court expenses.) The choice of Margolin as the Weisses’ counsel was significant, since he, a graduate of the Hebrew University and Yale Law School, had become one of the leading civil liberties attorneys in the city. As chairman of the Legal Committee of the Northern California chapter of the ACLU, Margolin had impeccable credentials in the civil liberties field. At the same time, he was an important figure in the organized Jewish community—an officer of the American Jewish Congress, JCRC, Bureau of Jewish Education, and Jewish Welfare Federation. Adding to the anger in the San Francisco Jewish community over the bookstore incident was the insensitivity shown in some quarters as to the meaning of Nazism. A local television station, in a broadcast editorial about the bookstore confrontation, stated that the “anti-Nazis,” that is, those Jews who had attacked the bookstore, “exhibited a mentality as ruthless and primitive as the one they were attacking.” “In that fashion,” noted Earl Raab, the director of JCRC, “was the calculated demolition of millions of people equated with the minor property damage done by some of its angry victims. Even those who most disapproved of the trashing knew that there was something pathological about that equation as 18 San Francisco Examiner, April 5, 1977, 5. 19 Ibid. 20 The charges against the Weisses were subsequently dropped.

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the main burden of a T.V. editorial.”21 In a televised rebuttal to the station’s editorial, noted attorney and JCRC chairman Mathew Weinberg argued that trashing of the bookstore “was not an organized action; it was a spontaneous act of rage against Nazi symbols by relatives of those who were tortured and killed under the aegis of those symbols. I do not defend violence, even against property. . . . But to turn the bookstore episode into a primary attack against the principles of Nazi butchery is a strange inversion of values and an affront to our common sense. But more than that, the editorial was a depressing sign that we have forgotten the horror which led America to fight a bloody war.”22 During the same period, Jewish leaders in San Francisco met with the management of a different local television station to protest another Nazi­related incident. While being interviewed by the station, Nazi party chief Vincent stated that at certain times during the year, American Jews “commit their blood sacrifice” and “Christian children begin to disappear from the streets.” The station received a large quantity of mail criticizing its editorial judgement in allowing the infamous “blood libel” to go unchallenged on public television. “By what measure of editorial judgment,” asked one Jewish communal leader, “had this hoary and gratuitous slander been allowed to remain in this filmed interview?” The station management’s explanation, that there was no “malicious intent” on its part, and that it was merely being “neutral” in reporting the opinions of newsworthy individuals, seemed to many Jews to represent precisely the kind of indifference to antisemitism that made it possible for Nazi activity to continue. Throughout 1977 and 1978, much time was spent by the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council in discussing ways of counteracting Nazi activity while, at the same time, protecting First Amendment guarantees of freedom of speech and assembly. A lawyer’s committee began to examine possible legislation that might limit Nazi activity and propaganda in a number of specific situations. In January 1978 a community-wide Committee for Continuing Education Against Nazism was organized under the auspices of the San Francisco Conference on Religion, Race, and Social Concerns. The committee was headed by San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and included Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy, as well as civic and business leaders.

21 Earl Raab, “The Insensitives—‘Neutral’ on Anti-Semitism,” Midstream 23 (August–September 1978): 59. 22 Mathew Weinberg, “Rebuttal,” editorial on “Freedom of Speech,” May 4–5, 1977, transcribed and reprinted by KGO-TV, San Francisco.

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Free Speech and the Nazis The First Amendment to the United States Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech . . . or the right of the people peacefully to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances.” The First Amendment, however, is by no means absolute; it has never been so interpreted by a majority of the United States Supreme Court. The view that the Constitution does not protect all forms of speech was most powerfully expressed by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. in his now classic dictum that “the most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man in falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater.” Over the past six decades a substantial body of legal opinion has developed, which stresses that those forms of speech and public expression that are “provocative” or injurious can indeed be restricted. Thus, Professor Philip B. Kurland of the University of Chicago Law School, in supporting the constitutionality of Skokie’s position vis-à­vis the Nazis, has observed that “no one denies the value of protecting the right to speak. But this does not mean that all speech is protected speech or that the context of the speech is irrelevant to the protection required to be afforded by the State.”23 Indeed, in at least one instance even the ACLU has refused to uphold the rights of Nazis to absolute freedom of speech. In May 1978 the Houston, Texas ACLU chapter voted not to aid a Nazi group whose recorded telephone message had been cut off by a court injunction. The message had offered a $5,000 bounty for “every non-white killed during an attack on a white person.” “Offering a bounty or a tangible incentive for murder,” commented ACLU executive director Aryeh Neier, “is not protected by the First Amendment.”24 The precedent cited most authoritatively by the courts on this matter is the landmark case of Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942). As Justice Murphy stated on behalf of the unanimous court: There are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words—those which by their utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social 23 Quoted in Mikva, “Skokie is Different,” 46. 24 Interview with Aryeh Neier, April 5, 1978.

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value as a step to truth that any benefit that may derive from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.25

Legal precedent for the restriction of provocative and defamatory speech can similarly be found in the 1951 opinion of Justice Robert Jackson in the case of Kunz v. New York: Kunz, a Baptist minister, had been convicted and fined for holding a religious meeting on the streets of New York without a permit. Pointing out that Kunz’s public meetings had included attacks on Catholics and Jews, Jackson argued that “to blanket hateful and hate­stirring attacks on races and faiths under the protections for freedom of speech may be a noble innovation. On the other hand, it may be a quixotic tilt at windmills which belittles great principles of liberty.” It made “a world of difference,” Jackson maintained, that Kunz had been speaking in street meetings, since that posed the question whether New York was required to place its streets at his service “to hurl insults at the passerby.” Jackson suggested that this case fell within the “fighting words” doctrine of the Chaplinsky case.26 The legal debate over Skokie has centered around the doctrine of “fighting words” first enunciated in Chaplinsky.27 Opposition to the Nazi march has been based on the fact that the Village of Skokie is heavily Jewish, with a substantial number of “survivors,” and that a Nazi march through its streets would thus be a deliberate effort to utter “fighting words” and provoke public disorder. Many Jews who agreed with the ACLU on the question of freedom of speech generally—even for Nazis and other antisemites—differed over the proposed march in Skokie. In their opinion, a parade by uniformed stormtroopers, complete with jack­boots and swastika armbands, was nothing short of a direct provocation, and thus was excluded from the protective umbrella of the First Amendment. In July 1977, the Illinois Appellate Court invoked the “fighting words” doctrine to uphold the local injunction barring the Nazi march. “The swastika,” the court declared, “is a personal affront to every member of the Jewish faith. It calls to mind the nearly consummated genocide of their people committed within 25 Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, 1942. For an interesting discussion of the Chaplinsky ruling see Hadley Arkes, “Civility and the Restriction of Speech: Rediscovering the Defamation of Groups,” in Free Speech and Association: The Supreme Court and the First Amendment, ed. Philip B. Kurland (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 414–422. 26 David Fellman, “Constitutional Rights of Association,” in Free Speech and Association: The Supreme Court and the First Amendment, ed. Philip B. Kurland (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 44. 27 See Aryeh Neier, Defending My Enemy (New York: Dutton, 1979), passim.

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memory by those who used the swastika as their symbol. . . . The epithets of racial and religious hatred are not protected speech.” Thus, the public display of the swastika, in the view of the Illinois Court, constituted “symbolic speech,” which, being the equivalent of “fighting words,” could legitimately be curtailed. The ACLU, arguing that the Appellate Court based its decision on a “novel” and entirely unwarranted interpretation of the Chaplinsky case, appealed on behalf of the Nazis first to the Illinois Supreme Court and then to the US Supreme Court for a stay of injunction. The swastika, it maintained, is “symbolic speech” just as fully protected by the First Amendment as the wearing of black armbands during the Vietnam War. The state, the ACLU claimed, does not have the power to decide which symbols are permissible and which are not. In taking this position, the ACLU was following the direction of the Supreme Court in recent years, as a majority of the Court had attempted to narrow the interpretation of Chaplinsky by suggesting that there is no way to effectively distinguish between forms of speech—real or symbolic—that are provocative or injurious and those that are neutral or inoffensive. In its 1971 decision in Cohen v. California, and in subsequent rulings, the Supreme Court made it more difficult to uphold antiNazi municipal ordinances on grounds of “provocative” speech. The judges who ruled in favor of the Nazis indicated that it was the “burden” of the Skokie residents to avoid “the offensive symbol if they can do so without unreasonable inconvenience.” Presumably, then, it would be the responsibility of the Holocaust survivors living in Skokie to stay indoors while the Nazis marched through their village. At the very least, they would have to avoid the City Hall area around which the march would be centered. The “burden” of the Holocaust survivors in San Francisco, whose B’nai Emunah synagogue was directly across the street from the Nazi bookstore, would be much greater; they could avoid the public display of the swastika in their midst only by ceasing to attend the synagogue. Would such “inconveniences,” some wondered, not constitute an infringement of Jewish civil rights?28 The Supreme Court and ACLU opinion that the swastika is “symbolic speech” deserving of protection under the First Amendment was challenged on a variety of grounds. For years the ACLU has argued that the best test of truth is the power of an idea to get itself accepted in the marketplace of ideas. Yet, one may ask, as have George Will, Hadley Arkes, and other critics of the ACLU position, what unresolved issue exists in the marketplace of ideas that the Nazis 28 This point is made by Marie Syrkin in “Sadat, Skokie and Cosmos 954,” Midstream 23 (March 1978): 65–66.

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may help to settle. “If we restrict the speech of Nazis,” Arkes has asked, “is it conceivable that we may shield ourselves from ideas that may turn out one day to be valid? Is it possible, for example, that a convincing case could yet be made for genocide if people were given a bit more time to develop the argument?”29 George Will maintains that the marketplace is not a good place to test truth, since it “measures preferences (popularity), not truth. Liberals say all ideas have an equal right to compete in the market. But the right to compete implies the right to win. So the logic of liberalism is that it is better to be ruled by Nazis than to restrict them.”30 Those who oppose the ACLU position maintain that the organization’s First Amendment rights of Nazis is a betrayal of its basic civil liberties function. “The overriding purpose of the ACLU,” argued Florida State University economist Abba P. Lerner in a letter to the New York Times, “is to promote and defend a democratic social order in which freedom of speech is secure. If this purpose comes into conflict with the freedom of speech directed at destroying such a social order, their obligation is surely to protect the social order of free speech rather than the free speech of its destroyers.”31 Through its staunch defense of the Nazis, these critics assert, the ACLU is helping to undermine the cause of civil liberties and liberal democracy itself. “The irony,” notes Arkes, “is that the ACLU sees itself as defending at this moment the freedom of a minority, but the principles on which it mounts that defense would cut the ground out from under constitutional government itself and, in that sense, would also imperil the freedom of all minorities.” Some of those opposing the ACLU position point out that the Nazis do not merely insist on their right to advocate freely the denial of freedom to others but anticipate, and receive, free legal assistance in support of their right to do so. Those taking this position concede that the Nazis have a right to march, but maintain that the ACLU, given its limited resources, should not provide the Nazis with free legal representation. The ACLU, they point out, turns away a number of cases in which civil liberties have been denied simply because it is unable to find the lawyers to handle them and unable to pay the costs of the litigation. Why, therefore, permit any part of the ACLU’s scarce funds to be wasted on the Nazis? As one such critic of the ACLU position, labor union leader Victor Gotbaum, has put it: “If you want to ask me if Nazis ought to march through Skokie, 29 Hadley Arkes, “Marching through Skokie,” National Review, May 12, 1978, 593. 30 George F. Will, “Nazis: Outside the Constitution,” Washington Post, February 2, 1978, A19. 31 New York Times, March 20, 1978, 20.

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I’d say ‘Yes,’ but if you ask me if the ACLU . . . should put its resources to work for them, I say, ‘No.’”32 In a reply to a letter by Aryeh Neier in the New York Jewish Week, one writer stated: I cannot agree that it is not “a clear and present danger” for demonstrators to deliberately provoke an outraged people into violence. It is far too much to expect Jews sensitive to the Nazi Holocaust to react dispassionately to an organized Nazi provocation in a Jewish neighborhood, just as it would be too much to expect the people of Harlem to be judicious about an organized anti-Black provocation in their area. Shouldn’t there be a distinction in law and law-enforcement between demonstrators for realization of constitutional rights and demonstrators who seek to destroy constitutional rights for others?33

Most American Jews clearly thought there should. Thus, by 1978 the search for an effective anti-Nazi legal strategy was well under way. In both San Francisco and Chicago, lawyers’ committees were formed within the Jewish community to explore possible group libel legislation or other legal action that might limit Nazi activity in a number of specific situations. At the May 1978 annual meeting of the American Jewish Committee, Hadley Arkes made an eloquent plea for the desirability of enacting group libel legislation aimed at the Nazis. He sat down to a standing ovation, a far different response from that he would have received from a comparable audience in the 1960s. Maynard Wishner, the AJC Board of Governors chairman, echoed the changing sentiments of many members when he observed: “This proposed march represents an obscenity. Saying ‘We aren’t finished with you’ or ‘Hitler was right’ goes beyond the pale of what we should expect under the First Amendment.”34 There was a similar shift of opinion within the American Jewish Congress. In 1960 the Congress had agreed that Nazis should be permitted to hold a rally in New York City. In 1978 the Congress, “after long and heated internal discussion,” urged the US Supreme Court to prohibit Nazis from marching through Skokie wearing Nazi uniforms, “which identify them as implementing the evil objectives of Hitlerism.”35 32 Quoted in Fred Ferretti, “The Buck Stops with Gotbaum,” New York Times Magazine, June 4, 1978, 89. 33 Phineas Stone, New York Jewish Week, August 7, 1977, 14. 34 Maynard Wishner, “American Nazis and the First Amendment,” Sh’ma, May 27, 1977, 136. 35 Stern, “The Dilemma of Skokie,” 6, and American Jewish Congress press release, February 2, 1978, 1

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The Crisis within the ACLU The ACLU’s decision to defend Chicago Nazi leader Frank Collin resulted in the most serious crisis in the organization’s history, a crisis from which, some believe, it may never recover.36 ACLU officials indicate that 40,000 members, out of a total membership of 250,000, resigned from the organization in 1977. In 1978 there were additional heavy membership losses. The resulting financial pinch led to a fifteen percent cut in the national ACLU staff, and a corresponding cut on the local level. Not surprisingly, the loss of membership and income was most dramatic in the Chicago area. David Hamlin, executive director of the ACLU’s Illinois affiliate, stated in August 1977: “We’ve projected that we’ll lose 25 per cent of our Illinois membership and our financial support because of this Nazi-Skokie case.” It is safe to assume that the majority of those resigning from the ACLU were Jews.37 During 1977 and 1978, ACLU staff officials made a concerted effort to broaden support for their position on Skokie within the Jewish community. Executive Director Aryeh Neier, while freely admitting his lack of involvement in Jewish affairs, spoke with pride of his Jewish background and reminded audiences that he and his parents had been refugees from the Nazis. National Chairman Norman Dorsen, a Jewish professor of law at New York University, presented the ACLU case to the Domestic Affairs Commission of the American Jewish Committee. Neier, Dorsen, and other ACLU leaders indicated that the angry Jewish response to the ACLU role in Skokie took them by surprise, since 36 Jim Mann, “Hard Times for the ACLU,” The New Republic, April 15, 1978, 12–15. The decline in ACLU membership since 1976 is not attributable solely to the Skokie controversy. A good many ACLU members were outraged by the organization’s decision to defend Ku Klux Klan members stationed at the Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton, California, after they were attacked by a group of Black marines in November 1976. See J. Anthony Lukas, “The ACLU against Itself,” New York Times Magazine, July 9, 1978, 11. 37 Not all groups in the Jewish community thought it wise for Jews to disassociate themselves. The Union of American Hebrew Congregation’s Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism stated that “one can disagree strongly with the approach of the ACLU, but it would be destructive of our deepest Jewish interests to contribute to the weakening and undermining of the ACLU on the American scene.” This position was also supported by the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Reform rabbinic group. See Albert Vorspan, memo on “Skokie,” Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, June 15, 1978. The UAHC position is further developed in its “Working Paper on Skokie,” on file at the Commission on Social Action of Reform Judaism, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, New York City.

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the organization had a long-standing policy of defending freedom of speech for Nazis. Why did Jews, both within and outside the organization, react so strongly to the ACLU role in Skokie? Certainly, the crucial factor was the burgeoning Holocaust consciousness of American Jews; the feeling that, no matter what, Nazism must never again be permitted to lift its head. At the same time, Jewish anger over the ACLU defense of the Nazis has to be seen in the context of a growing Jewish disillusionment with the general drift of the organization’s policies. Until the early 1960s the ACLU was a relatively small (45,000 members) organization, heavily concentrated in New York and devoted primarily to filing amicus curiae briefs in free speech and other First Amendment cases. Since that time, however, the Union has been transformed into a “mass organization with a large professional staff, involved in a wide range of concerns, of which fundamental civil liberties issues such as free speech and free assembly are only a small part.”38 It was the Vietnam War that first thrust the organization into the political and social arena. When Dr. Benjamin Spock was indicted for counseling draft evasion, the national ACLU board agreed to take the case, although a number of members voiced concern that such a step would result in the organization’s defending Spock’s politics, rather than his civil liberties. In 1970 Aryeh Neier was elected executive director as the “candidate of the left”; he was responsible for pushing the organization in a more political direction.39 Following the Cambodian invasion and the Kent State incident, the ACLU, under Neier’s direction, passed a resolution calling for the “immediate termination” of the war, a popular political stance that won the organization thousands of new members. In 1973, after an acrimonious internal debate, the ACLU became the first major national organization to call for Richard Nixon’s impeachment. By the mid-1970s the politicization of the ACLU had, in many respects, become the salient feature of its organizational life. Jewish involvement in the ACLU had been conspicuous and consistent since the organization’s founding in 1920.40 Among those playing a direct role in

38 Mann, “Hard Times for the ACLU,” 13. See also Joseph W. Bishop, Jr., “Politics and the ACLU,” Commentary 33 (December 1971): 50–58. 39 Lukas, “The ACLU against Itself,” 20. 40 ln recounting the history of the ACLU, Roger Baldwin, the guiding spirit behind the organization, stated that he could not “remember a time from when [he] first began when there was not a very strong Jewish presence” in the ACLU. See interview with Roger Baldwin,

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establishing the ACLU were Felix Frankfurter, Stephen Wise, and Arthur Garfield Hayes. Louis Marshall, while not a card-carrying member, argued several cases on the ACLU’s behalf during the 1920s, as did his law partner Samuel Untermeyer. Morris Ernst, who was instrumental in organizing both the American Newspaper Guild and National Lawyers’ Guild during the 1930s, served as ACLU general counsel for many years. In 1937, when the ACLU first engaged in the legal defense of Nazis, it was Ernst and Hays who urged Mayor La Guardia of New York to approve the use of city property for a Nazi meeting. Hays also aided the attorney for the (Nazi) Friends of New Germany in court proceedings appealing a prohibition of meetings by that group in New Jersey. In 1955 Osmond K. Fraenkel, who had assisted Ernst in preparing the defense for the Scottsboro case, became general counsel to the ACLU. In the 1960s and 1970s Aryeh Neier played a crucial role in the organization. Many staff attorneys and affiliate executives, including David Goldberger in Chicago and David Fishlow and Ruth Jacobs in San Francisco, are Jewish. When Neier resigned as executive director in October 1978, Ira Glasser, a New Yorker, running against Marvin Schacter of Los Angeles, was elected to succeed him. Despite the large number of Jews in leadership positions in the ACLU during the latter half of the 1960s and throughout the 1970s, the organization manifested a cold indifference to the concerns of the Jewish community. Neier and his Jewish colleagues were representative of a “new politics”-oriented group of civil rights attorneys and social policy experts for whom the ethnic concerns of Jews—whether the welfare of the State of Israel, or the institutional needs of the Jewish community, or just the protective comfort of political representation— were at best a peripheral matter. The focus of their attention was the political agenda and rhetoric of the New Left, Black Power, and the Third World. Thus, it is not surprising that on issue after issue, between 1966 and 1978, the ACLU took a stand that was seen by many as being inimical to Jewish interests. The ACLU, for example, supported the proposal by the Lindsay administration in New York City to establish a civilian review board for the police department. During the New York City teachers’ strike, the organization backed demands by Black militants for community control of the schools. The ACLU came to the defense of the openly anti-Jewish Black Panthers in their confrontations with the police. Finally, the ACLU opposed Marco De Funis and Alan Bakke in their suits charging reverse discrimination. November 16, 1973, 16, on file at William E. Wiener Oral History Collection, American Jewish Committee.

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Against the background of the ACLU’s drift to the Left and its indifference to the Jewish communal agenda, the organization’s defense of the Nazis appeared to many Jews as the final insult. Small wonder that the ACLU suffered significant membership losses.

Combatting the Nazis: The Legislative Front In Jewish communal circles throughout the United States much effort has been made over the past few years to develop a legal strategy to combat Nazism in America. The enactment of effective anti-Nazi legislation, however, has proved to be no simple matter. Indeed, the inability to pass such legislation has been a source of frustration and concern to Jewish communal leaders. The experience in San Francisco offers insight into the difficulties that arise in attempting to combat Nazis by legal means.41 During the early months of 1974, as was noted above, Nazi party members began to sit in on public meetings of the city’s Board of Education. Despite the heated objections of Jews and Blacks in the audience, to whom the Nazi uniform symbolized both racism and genocide, there was no legal way to halt Nazis. As an official statement of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission issued at the time put it: “The Board of Education must let anyone enter the hall when there is a public meeting in session. . . . The Board of Education must let anyone speak. . . . The City of San Francisco and San Franciscans detest the Nazis, but we must allow them to speak, within the limits of the First Amendment. The courts would force us to let them speak, if we did not, and the courts would be right.”42 The problem posed by the presence of the Nazis at the Board of Education meetings was similarly articulated by the Jewish Community Relations Council: “The presence of that [Nazi] symbol at the Board of Education meeting is disgusting and disturbing to all of us. It is also frustrating in the extreme because there is no way to ban the presence of these individuals from a public meeting without destroying our most basic principle of liberty, and therefore handing a great victory to the Nazis. . . .”43 After consulting with Jewish communal leaders, supervisors Quentin Kopp and Robert Mendelsohn proposed a new municipal ordinance which would 41 The discussion that follows is based on David G. Dalin, Public Affairs and the Jewish Community: The Changing Political World of San Francisco Jews (PhD diss., Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 1977), 152–155. 42 San Francisco Jewish Bulletin, January 25, 1974, 1. 43 Ibid.

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have made it illegal to wear the uniform or insignia of the Nazi party in public. The proposed ordinance, however, while enjoying widespread popular support, both within the Jewish and the general community, never became law. On May 20 City Attorney O’Connor advised the Board of Supervisors that it could not legally outlaw the wearing of Nazi, or any other, uniforms in public. The United States Supreme Court, he indicated, had in the past consistently ruled that the wearing of political symbols is “symbolic speech” protected by the free speech provisions of the First Amendment. In 1969, for example, the Court ruled (Tinker v. Des Moines) that students could not be prevented from wearing black armbands to school in order to protest the Vietnam War. In 1960 a Miami ordinance prohibiting the wearing of Nazi (or Communist) uniforms in public places was struck down by a state court. In the wake of O’Connor’s advisory opinion, the board’s State and National Affairs Committee called upon the state legislature to deal with the matter. During the next three years, however, the legislature in Sacramento failed to enact any anti-Nazi legislation. Hence, at the time of the opening of the Rudolf Hess bookstore in 1977 there was still no legal way to ban the public display of Nazi symbols. It was in response to this legislative void that Supervisor Dianne Feinstein, as was noted above, introduced a new resolution urging the legislature to bar the display of the swastika and the wearing of the Nazi uniform in public. In cosponsoring this resolution, Supervisor Mendelsohn said that the display of Nazi symbols and uniforms “provokes acts of violence and threatens the public peace.” Mendelsohn and the other supervisors, however, expressed doubt about the proposal’s chances of being enacted as state law. This in fact proved to be the case. One other unsuccessful effort at passing anti-Nazi legislation in San Francisco is worth noting. In early 1978 it was revealed that the Nazis were holding meetings at the Wawona Clubhouse, a rented public facility in the city-owned Sigmund Stern Grove. The JCRC issued a statement protesting “the private use of public facilities by Nazi groups, which exclude people on the basis of race and religion.” On the basis of a municipal ordinance requiring that there be no discrimination in the rental of city property, Supervisor Kopp sought to evict the Nazis. The City Attorney, backed by the ACLU, ruled in March, however, that the ordinance in question did not apply to the Nazis, because of an amendment stating that rentals of less than thirty days a year would be exempt from the law’s provisions. The Jewish community’s efforts to combat Nazi activity were thus once again thwarted. In Chicago the Jewish community has found itself similarly powerless to enact anti-Nazi legislation. Illinois State Senators John Nimrod and Howard

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Carroll introduced two bills in May 1978; one would have empowered local officials to deny parade permits for demonstrations which might result in defamation of a group because of race, creed, color, or religion; the other would have allowed for the rejection of parade permits if there were “reasonable apprehension” about violence occurring as a result of the display of “quasi-military” uniforms.44 The first bill, by making group defamation criminally punishable, might have served as a model for similar laws in other states. Illinois, it should be noted, had first enacted group libel legislation in 1917 (it was upheld by the United States Supreme Court in 1952 in a 5–4 decision), but the law had been repealed in 1964. After the Illinois State Senate adopted the two bills, the state’s Assembly Judiciary Committee met to consider the matter. Spokesmen for Skokie’s Jewish community, including Rabbi Laurence Montrose and Erna Gans, then president of the B’nai B’rith Korczak Lodge in Skokie, testified on the bill’s behalf. They urged the legislators to speak out by passing the statutes, just as the residents of Skokie had spoken out by resisting the Nazi demonstration. Joel Sprayregen, a prominent Chicago civil liberties attorney, who had been a staff counsel for the ACLU in the early 1960s and had subsequently served for several years as a member of its board of directors, testified in favor of the proposed bills, while ACLU executive director Aryeh Neier testified in opposition. Following the Sprayregen-Neier debate, the committee voted. To the shock of the many Holocaust survivors in attendance, the anti-Nazi bills were soundly defeated; the Judiciary Committee voted 15–5 against the group libel bill and 16–4 against the bill introduced by Carroll. Chicago’s Jewish community viewed the defeat of the bills as a moral victory for the Nazis, who called a press conference to celebrate the legislature’s inaction.45 In Milwaukee, efforts at enacting anti-Nazi legislation met with similar results. The Brennan ordinance, patterned on the Illinois bill prohibiting group defamation, won the support of the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors but was subsequently defeated in the Common Council of the City of Milwaukee. In the view of political observers, the ordinance’s defeat was largely due to the efforts of the Wisconsin chapter of the ACLU, which vigorously defended the Nazis’ constitutional rights.46

44 JTA Daily News Bulletin, May 30, 1978, 4. 45 Neier, Defending My Enemy, 62–65. 46 Zvi Deutsch, “Milwaukee Jews Counter Nazi Threat,” Jewish Currents (September 1977): 6.

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Combatting the Nazis: The Educational Front As legislative efforts to combat neo-Nazism proved increasingly ineffective, American Jewry turned its attention to the educational front. There was growing support within the Jewish community for the introduction of Holocaust study courses on both the high school and university levels. During the 1977–1978 school year, such courses were in fact mandated in the New York City and Philadelphia school systems. Jews were concerned that the history of the Holocaust was little understood by young people, since most social studies texts and curricula avoided the subject. One survey of the 45 most widely used high-school social studies textbooks revealed that 15 “omitted any mention of the Nazi persecution of Jews and 22 glossed over the facts.”47 In April 1977 the San Francisco Conference on Religion, Race and Social Concerns, an interfaith social action group coordinated by JCRC associate director Rita Semel, announced the formation of a city-wide committee for “community education” against Nazism. A cross section of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish clergy and civic leaders, including Mayor George Moscone and Supervisors Kopp and Feinstein, agreed to join the committee, whose purpose would be “to focus on educating the public on what is behind the headlines . . . why Nazism is and should be anathema to a democratic society and why the fight against its ideology must be broadened and strengthened.” Plans called for the in-service training of teachers, as well as “education for the general public” through the showing of movies such as “Judgment at Nuremburg.” “The teaching of social studies,” noted Semel, “has changed so that World War II is barely mentioned in many courses now. And we’re now in the fourth generation. Not only haven’t the kids lived through World War II, many of the teachers haven’t either.”48 Public education concerning Nazism took a significant step forward in April 1978 when NBC televised Holocaust, a nine-hour prime-time special dealing with Jewish fate under the Nazis. Jewish and Christian organizations, as well as NBC, developed a variety of discussion guides targeted for different audiences, to be utilized in conjunction with the show. Under the auspices of the National Jewish Welfare Board, fifteen Jewish agencies joined together in preparing a “Holocaust Program Package” designed “to transform this TV special into a ‘multi-media’ educational tool for use in formal and informal Jewish 47 Judith Herschlag Muff, “US Teaching on the Holocaust,” Patterns of Prejudice (May–June 1977): 29. 48 San Francisco Examiner, April 7, 1977, 4.

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educational settings.”49 The National Council of Churches, in cooperation with the National Conference of Catholic Bishops and the American Jewish Committee, produced a four-page interreligious study and discussion guide for use by churches throughout the country. NBC developed its own discussion guide, which it distributed, through its 217 affiliated stations, free of charge to public schools across the nation. The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council asked its constituent agencies to utilize “every possible channel to the non-Jewish community” to encourage public viewing of Holocaust. In some cities cooperative efforts were undertaken by local NBC affiliates and Jewish community relations councils in arranging a pre-screening of the program for various religious, ethnic, and civic leaders. NJCRAC also encouraged its constituent agencies to organize follow-up programs to Holocaust and intergroup dialogues on various aspects of the Holocaust and contemporary neo-Nazism. “We are attempting,” one NJCRAC leader noted, “to teach the lessons of the Holocaust to our nonJewish neighbors. If we cannot stop Nazi appearances, if we must endure the anguish, must we not use every possible means to fasten the general public’s attention onto the principles for which the Nazis stand?”50

The Lessons of Skokie The threatened Nazi march through Skokie represented a radically new experience for many American Jews, especially those under the age of thirty-five. As Eugene DuBow, organizer of the planned PAC counterdemonstration, noted, it had been many years since American Jewry was faced with the prospect of a major Nazi demonstration in an area heavily populated by Jews. The planned Nazi march in Skokie forced many Jews to weigh their commitment to civil liberties against their concern for Jewish security and abhorrence of Nazism. There were Jews in Skokie who had the gnawing feeling that history was repeating itself, that Nazism was once again on the rise. “There are the echoes of history rumbling through your mind and ticking off similarities and parallels that are all too uncomfortable,” said one Skokie resident. “Absurd analogies you say? Hitler started off small, bluffed and got what he wanted by promoting ideas 49 Materials for NBC-TV Holocaust Series, National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council memo, February 24, 1978, 2. 50 Theodore R. Mann, address delivered at NJCRAC plenary session, Tucson, Arizona, January 22–23, 1978, 5.

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contrary to what the vast majority of people and countries believed. He radicalized antisemitism. So has Collin. Hitler used the law to promote his ‘rights’ until he was in a position of power to have his will alone become law. So has Collin. His violence of words, deed and symbols are protected.”51 There was a determination in the Skokie Jewish community, and among Jews throughout the United States, not to sit idly by in the face of Nazi threats. This was a much different communal response from that of the 1960s, when the policy of the organized Jewish community had been one of “quarantine,” that is, to ignore most Nazi incidents in the hope that the Nazis, bereft of publicity and media attention, would disappear.52 By 1978 leaders of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council were seriously reconsidering the wisdom of the quarantine approach. “I am troubled by our 1963 conclusion that public protests against Nazi appearances merely provide them with increased publicity and bolster their image of martyred heroes,” stated NJCRAC chairman Theodore Mann. “It seems to me curiously outdated. . . . The concept of quarantine as the general rule seems to be an anachronism.” On the contrary, Mann argued, “Jewish leadership should be able to fashion a counter-demonstration or protest march or meeting, with signs and literature and releases to the media depicting the bestial acts of Nazi Germany, which would provide both an outlet for Jewish anguish and a lesson for our neighbors as to what the swastika really means.”53 A shift from quietism toward communal activism vis-à-vis the Nazis was apparent in San Francisco, where JCRC urged the “organized Jewish community to speak out vociferously and take prompt and militant action against the Nazis in any way that will hurt the Nazi cause.”54 A reporter noted that in Skokie “Jews, who normally would be appalled at the thought of taking to the streets, now are thinking the unthinkable.”55 Sol Goldstein, chairman of the PAC Committee on American and Jewish Security, maintained that it was the determination of thousands of people to confront the Nazis that had scared them off. Goldstein emphasized that he re51 Arthur J. Sabin, “Skokie,” Sh’ma, September 15, 1978, 163. 52 The “quarantine” strategy was first developed in the 1940s. See S. Andhil Fineberg, “Checkmate for Rabble-Rousers,” Commentary 8 (September 1946): 220–226 and idem, Deflating the Professional Bigot (New York: Institute of Human Relations, 1960), 8–10. 53 Mann, NJCRAC plenary address, 5. NJCRAC memo to member agencies, February 24, 1978. 54 How to Prevent Nazism, discussion guide, Jewish Community Relations Council, San Francisco, 1978, 49. 55 San Francisco Examiner, June 26, 1977.

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garded Skokie as only “one battlefront” of a much larger “war.” “This battlefront gained a victory. But the war is not over. . . . We will come to any place the Nazis will appear.” The lesson of Skokie, Goldstein maintained, was that the Nazis would back down “when confronted by a determined American public.”56 In commenting on the cancellation of the Nazi march, National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council chairman Theodore Mann noted: “The important lesson of Skokie is that the Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps found that they were not alone as they were 40 years ago.”57 Skokie’s Holocaust survivors had the satisfaction of having kept the Nazis out of their community. Their active opposition helped educate a generation that had grown up with only a dim awareness of what Nazism was all about. “Sure, the Nazis have gotten publicity because of our opposition,” said Korczak B’nai B’rith lodge president Erna Gans, “but we’ve also raised the consciousness of the American people. Schools are beginning to teach courses on the Holocaust. People from around the country are standing with us. When I talk to groups, they all want to know what they can do to keep Nazism from happening here.”58

56 JTA Daily News Bulletin, June 27, 1978, 4. 57 Mann, NJCRAC plenary address. 58 April 11, 1978 press conference by Erna Gans leading delegation of Holocaust survivors at the Dr. Janusz Korczak B‘nai B’rith lodge in Skokie, IL that was reported in the local and national press. Gans served as first president of the Holocaust Memorial Foundation of Illinois until her death in 1999. The Foundation evolved into the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center. Along with other survivors’ efforts, her work resulted in the passing of a law in 1990 making Illinois the first state in the country to mandate Holocaust education. See also United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Oral History with Erna Gans, June 15, 1981, RG Number: RG–50.477.1546.

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Jewish Republicanism and City Politics: The San Francisco Experience, 1911–1963* Since the Gold Rush decade of the 1850s, individual Jews have played an active role in the political life of San Francisco. In 1853, three years after the admission of California to the Union, Elkan Heydenfeldt and Isaac N. Cardozo, whose nephew, Benjamin N. Cardozo, would later serve as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court, represented San Francisco in the third State Assembly.1 In that same decade, Solomon Heydenfeldt and Henry A. Lyons, both San Franciscans, served on the California Supreme Court.2 By the turn of the century, Jews had been elected or appointed to many local political offices. In 1894, in the depth of the Depression, Adolph Sutro was elected mayor on the Populist ticket.3 The city also produced a Jewish political “boss,” who for four

*

1

2

3

“Jewish and Non-Partisan Republicanism in San Francisco, 1911–1963” was published in the June 1979 issue of the American Jewish Historical Quarterly. Reprinted by permission of the American Jewish Historical Society. California Blue Book 1975 (Sacramento, CA: California State Printing Office, 1975), 192, 210; Earl Rabb, “There’s No City like San Francisco: Profile of a Jewish Community,” in Commentary on the American Scene, ed. Elliot E. Cohen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), 81. Stanley Mosk, “A Majority of the California Supreme Court,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 8 (April 1976): 224–231. Further biographical material on Heydenfeldt can be found in A. M. Friedenberg, “Solomon Heydenfeldt: A Jewish Jurist of Alabama and California,” Publications of the American Jewish Historical Society (1902): 129–140; Norton B. Stern and William M. Kramer, “The Historical Recovery of the Pioneer Sephardic Jews of California,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 8 (October 1975): 14–15. Sutro, San Francisco’s first Jewish mayor, served from 1894 to 1896. Robert E. Levinson, “Adolph Sutro,” Encyclopedia Judaica; also Robert E. and Mary F. Stewart, Adolph Sutro: A Biography (Berkeley, CA: Howell-North Books, 1962).

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years, until his arraignment before the Superior Court in the Sabbath-school room of the newly completed Sherith Israel, his parents’ temple and the only major building to withstand the earthquake and fire in 1906, completely controlled city government. Significantly, the notorious Abe Ruef, ironically the best-known political figure in San Francisco history, opened the way to a new era in the city’s political annals.4 In 1911, the election of Mayor James G. Rolph, Jr. ushered in a period of non-partisan Republicanism in San Francisco politics, which would last for more than fifty years. Until 1963 every mayor of the city was to be a Republican while the Board of Supervisors remained a virtual Republican preserve. In this political climate, Jews who actively participated in San Francisco politics did so, almost invariably, as Republicans and with but few exceptions as non-partisan Republicans. Jewish Republicanism in the city was not something new. Ever since the Civil War, San Francisco Jews had tended to identify with, and support, the Republican Party. This identification was encouraged, in San Francisco as elsewhere, by the friendly attitude displayed toward American Jewry by a succession of Republican presidents, by the vigorous protests made by their administrations against antisemitic outrages and pogroms in Russia and the Balkans, and by the natural predilection of businessmen to identify with the party of prosperity, progress, and respectability.5 Jewish Republicanism prior to the New Deal was, of course, not unique to San Francisco. In New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati, and other cities, Jews were strongly Republican until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In New York City, for example, Samuel Koenig was the Manhattan Republican chairman from 1911 to 1932, while Louis Marshall, president of the American Jewish Committee, one of the most respected Jewish communal leaders of his day, similarly played an influential role in Republican Party affairs throughout this era. A “staunch and consistent Republican,” Marshall endorsed Republican candidates for election, took an active part in intraparty squabbles, and worked closely with Republican congressmen and state 4

5

Lawrence H. Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1956), 46. The definitive work on Ruef ’s career is Walton Bean’s Boss Ruef’s San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1967); see also James P. Walsh, “Abe Ruef Was No Boss: Machine Politics, Reform and San Francisco,” California HistoricaI Quarterly 51, no. 1 (February–March 1972): 3–16, and a fictional biography, Lately Thomas, The Debonair Scoundrel (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1962). Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 44–45 and 52–54; and Nathaniel Weyl, The Jew in American Politics (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1968), 63–64 and 93–95.

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legislators.6 In Chicago, “favorable Jewish support for Republican commercial and industrial policies, first established in the 1860s, coalesced to forge a strong tradition of voting Republican in state and national contests that remained unchanged until the 1930s,”7 while the German-Jewish leadership of Philadelphia, similarly, supported the Republican Party for several generations.8 In Cincinnati in the 1920s, Murray Seasongood, a vigorous fighter for reform and the City Charter movement, became the third Jewish Republican mayor of that city since the turn of the century.9 There, as in San Francisco, the majority of the city’s Jewish community was of German background. This last point is an important one for placing Jewish political behavior in San Francisco in a national context: Jewish Republicanism in the city was attributable, at least in part, to the fact that San Francisco’s Jews until the end of World War II were disproportionately of German-Jewish origin. During the Gold Rush decade of the 1850s, the great majority of Jewish settlers in San Francisco had been immigrants from Bavaria and other parts of Germany. By the time of the great earthquake and fire that devastated the city in 1906, the local Jewish community numbered approximately 30,000,10 of whom not more than 6,000 were of East European background. Until the 1950s, Jews of East European origin would continue to comprise but a small segment of the city’s Jewish population. Prior to World War II, as Earl Raab has noted, “there were never in San Francisco . . . the job opportunities that would encourage a mass influx of East Europeans of the first generation.”11 Morton Rosenstock, Louis Marshall: Defender of Jewish Rights (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1965), 55; cf. Moses Rischin, The Promised City: New York’s Jews 1870– 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 221, 229. 7 Edward Mazur, “Jewish Chicago: From Diversity to Community,” in The Ethnic Frontier, ed. Melvin G. Holli and Peter d’A . Jones (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1977), 284. 8 Daniel Elazar and Murray Friedman, Moving Up: Ethnic Succession in America (New York: Institute on Pluralism and Group Identity of the American Jewish Committee, 1976), 25. On the Republican era in Philadelphia politics, see also Dennis Clark, The Irish in Philadelphia: Ten Generations of Irish Experience (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1973); and James Reichley, The Art of Government: Reform and Organization Politics in Philadelphia (New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1959). 9 Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 66. 10 Martin Wiener, “Jewish Life in San Francisco, 1905–1910” (unpublished seminar paper, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cinncinati, OH, 1962, on file at the Western Jewish History Center, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA), 3. 11 Raab, “There’s No City like San Francisco: Profile of a Jewish Community,” 83–84. In the small-scale garment industry only eight percent of the workers were Jews. 6

12. Jewish Republicanism and City Politics: The San Francisco Experienc

Throughout America during this era, German Jews were usually associated with the Republican Party. As more than one scholar has noted, the first and primary interest of German-American Jewry was to become fully accepted members of the American body politic.12 In local political affairs, as Edward Mazur has suggested, “the German-Jewish quest for security, status, and acceptability by the larger American community led them to support measures, policies, and candidates . . . who found their major supporters in the . . . reformist wing of the Republican party.”13 Increasingly, in San Francisco, Chicago, and elsewhere, they called for non­partisanship in local government as a means of curbing the excesses of machine politics, “boss” rule, and municipal waste and corruption. There had, to be sure, been a close rapport between Irish Democratic reformer James D. Phelan, mayor of San Francisco from 1897 to 1901, and leaders of San Francisco’s Jewish community. H. U. Brandenstein, for example, a member of a prominent local German-Jewish family and a municipal reformer who would, subsequently, win election to the Board of Supervisors, had been a close advisor of the mayor, as had a few other members of the city’s German-Jewish elite.14 When Brandenstein announced his candidacy for District Attorney in 1905, Phelan had been among his most vigorous supporters.15 Political friendships

12 See, for example, Daniel J. Elazar, “American Political Theory and the Political Notions of American Jews,” in The Ghetto and Beyond: Essays on .Jewish Life in America, ed. Peter I. Rose (New York: Random House, 1969), 213. 13 Mazur, “Jewish Chicago,” 284. 14 Brandenstein was the son of Joseph Brandenstein, a native of Hume, Germany, who established a wholesale tobacco and cigar business in San Francisco in 1854, and became one of the city’s more prominent Jewish leaders. His son, Max Joseph Brandenstein, founded the MJB coffee firm in 1881, and was later joined in the firm by his brothers Edward and Manfred (“Mannie”). Their brother, H. U. Brandenstein, a graduate of the Harvard Law School, served on the Board of Education in 1898–1899, on the Board of Supervisors in 1900–1904, and was active in Jewish community life as well. A contemporary biographical sketch of H. U. Brandenstein can be found in Evarts Blake, ed., San Francisco and its Municipal Administration, 1902 (San Francisco, CA: Pacific Publishing, 1902), 166. For an interesting account of Manfred Brandenstein’s family, and of his involvement with the MJB coffee firm, as recounted by his daughter, see Ruth Bransten McDougall, Under Mannie’s Hat (San Francisco, CA: Fay L. Francisco Company, 1974). 15 Brandenstein enjoyed substantial backing and support within the Jewish community. In endorsing his candidacy for District Attorney, the Hebrew had stated: “We take great pleasure in joining and increasing the general chorus of approval heard on every side in regard to the fitness of the selection of Henry U. Brandenstein as the nominee of both the regular Democratic and Republican parties for District Attorney. Mr. Brandenstein’s brilliant record as a Supervisor; especially as chairman of the finance committee, has marked him out for promotion right along the official line. Upright and fearless, capable in every way, genial yet faith-

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between Irish-Catholic Democratic leaders and the city’s German Jews were atypical, however. While the city’s small East European Jewish population may not always have followed the German-Jewish leadership’s support of Republican municipal charter reform, “fiscal responsibility,” and good government, the great majority of San Francisco Jews were, of course, of German background and consistently Republican. By 1911, and during the decades ahead, members of the established and prosperous German-Jewish community had begun to play an increasingly pioneer German-Jewish families who had been Republican since the Civil War.16 The family fortunes of the Fleishhackers, Hellmans, Koshlands, Steinharts, Dinkelspiels, and other members of San Francisco’s German-Jewish upper class were, increasingly, between 1911 and the 1960s, used to promote and finance Republican candidates and campaigns in the city and state. Jewish Republicanism in San Francisco was unique, however, persisting long beyond the New Deal, while Jews in most other cities had shifted to the Democratic Party with the election of FDR. To be sure, in a few other cities— Philadelphia, Cincinnati, and Chicago—an affluent Jewish group did remain at least partially identified with the local Republican Party after the 1930s. And, also, the type of non-partisan, split-ticket voting that, as Fuchs has suggested, characterized the political behavior of American Jewry generally during this era was to a limited degree evident in the political behavior of San Francisco Jews as well. Thus, whereas Boston’s Jews, voting overwhelmingly Democratic at the municipal level, might split tickets to vote for “progressive” Republicans such as Henry Cabot Lodge and Leverett Saltonstall during the I940s,17 so too some staunch and heretofore traditionally Republican Jews in San Francisco would, on occasion, split tickets to vote for Roosevelt or Adlai Stevenson, while at the same time remaining loyal to the local administrations of Mayors Rossi, Lapham, Robinson, and Christopher, whose candidacies they continued to vigorously support. Such occasional non-partisan voting notwithstanding, from the late nineteenth century through the 1950s, those Jews who held political office—elective and appointive—in San Francisco did so, with few exceptions, as Republicans. In this respect, the Jewish political experience in San Francisco was truly distincful to duty, he is an ideal official from whom great things may be expected. He is a credit to the Jewish people from whom he sprang. . . .” Hebrew, San Francisco, October 20, 1905, 4. 16 Wiener, “Jewish Life in San Francisco,” 8. 17 Fuchs, The Political Behavior of American Jews, 137–139.

12. Jewish Republicanism and City Politics: The San Francisco Experienc

tive. For this reason, and because the era of Republican ascendancy in the city was also an era of extraordinary Jewish influence in the government and politics of the city, the nature of Jewish involvement in San Francisco political life from 1911 to 1963 is especially deserving of close attention and careful analysis. By the turn of the century and afterwards, Jews were taking leading positions in Republican Party politics in San Francisco and throughout the state. The most prominent and widely respected Jewish Republican figure in the first quarter of the twentieth century was Julius Kahn who served as congressman from San Francisco’s Fourth Congressional District from 1898 to 1902 and from 1904 until his death in 1924. Born in Kuppenheim, Germany in 1861, Kahn was taken to the United States at the age of five. Embarking on a theatrical career at the age of eighteen, the young actor was associated with Edwin Booth and other stage celebrities and in 1887 was elected vice president of the local actors’ guild. In 1891, tiring of the theater, Kahn began to study law in San Francisco and to take an active interest in local Republican politics. A delegate to the Republican State Convention at Stockton in 1892, Kahn was elected to the State Assembly that same year, and to Congress a few years later. During his twenty-four years in the House of Representatives, he became one of the most influential congressmen on Capitol Hill.18 A strong advocate of universal military training and naval preparedness, author of the first Selective Service Act, the ranking Republican member and for some years chairman of the House Military Affairs Committee, Kahn took charge of legislation for reorganizing the army on a peacetime basis.19 A onetime candidate for speaker of the House20 (and the only Jew to have ever been seriously considered for the post), Kahn served more years in Congress than did any other congressman until that time from the Pacific Coast, and longer than did any other American Jew except for New York’s Emanuel Celler. “In some respects, he had the most remarkable career of any member of Congress, counting the 136 years of the life of Congress,” declared the Hon. Isaac Sherwood of Ohio, in his memorial address in the House of Representatives. “No 18 Kahn’s political career is discussed in “From Theater to Congress,” Emanu­EI, January 12, 1900, 6; Harry N. Bartlett, “Julius Kahn—San Francisco’s Congressman, 1898–1924” (unpublished seminar paper, Department of History, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, 1966, copy of Bartlett’s paper is on file at the Western Jewish History Center, Judah L. Magnes Museum, Berkeley, CA); Burton Alan Boxerman, “Kahn of California,” California Historical Quarterly 55 (Winter 1976–1977); Robert E. Levinson, “Julius Kahn,” Encyclopedia Judaica. 19 Ibid. 20 Bartlett, “Julius Kahn,” 1.

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member from a large city,” continued Sherwood, “ever served 12 terms in succession except Julius Kahn. Only seven members of Congress out of 4,080 Congressmen who served in the 136 years in this Chamber had a longer service. . . .”21 While his active political life “gave him little time for Jewish communal interests, he was nevertheless not indifferent to his religious ties.”22 Kahn was for many years an active member of Congregation Ohabai Shalom of San Francisco, and with Jacob Voorsanger, the Rabbi of Temple Emanu-El, he helped establish the Jewish Educational Society of San Francisco, the first of its kind on the West Coast. Throughout his political career, Kahn received the vigorous support of Voorsanger and other Jewish communal leaders in the city. When Kahn first ran for Congress in 1898, Rabbi Voorsanger called attention to Kahn’s record in the California legislature in endorsing his candidacy. “We are proud,” concluded Voorsanger, “of his record. Julius Kahn in Congress will be the first Hebrew elected from the west of the Rocky Mountains, and he will be a most worthy and able representative of the people of California.”23 In 1919, Kahn was a member of a commission of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations to which was assigned the task of endeavoring to have inserted in the Covenant of the League of Nations a universal religious liberty clause.24 For years, Kahn’s activities and legislative accomplishments in Washington were proudly reported in the pages of the local Jewish weekly Emanu-El.25 Upon his death in 1924, Kahn’s widow and close associate, Florence Prag Kahn, was appointed to his House seat, which she held until 1937.26 H. Schneiderman, “Julius Kahn,” American Jewish Year Book 27 (1925): 241. Ibid., 242. Emanu-EI, September 9, 1898, 5. Schneiderman, “Julius Kahn,” 242–243. See, for example, “Congressman Kahn Busy Again in Washington,” Emanu-EI, December 16, 1921, 4. 26 Kahn died on December 18, 1924; San Francisco Chronicle, December 19, 1924, 1–2. See also “Kahn’s Service to be Held Tomorrow: Simple Rites al Temple Emanu-El at Request of Congressman’s Widow,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 1924, 3; and “Death of a Congressman,” Emanu-EI, December 26, 1924, 2. Mrs. Kahn was elected to her late husband’s congressional seat in a special election on February 17, 1925. Mrs. Kahn’s campaign for Congress is discussed in: “Mrs. Kahn May Succeed Her Husband: Political Leaders Favor Nomination,” San Francisco Chronicle, December 20, 1924, 3; “Mrs. Florence Kahn is Candidate to Succeed Her Late Husband,” Emanu-EI, January 2, 1925, 4; “Sheriff Finn Endorses Mrs. Kahn,” Emanu­El, January 30, 1925, 10; and “Support Mrs. Kahn for Congress,” Emanu­ El, February 13, 1925, 14. See also Harriet Hansen, “Woman Enters Politics: San Francisco’s Pioneer Congresswoman, Florence Prag Kahn” (MA thesis, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA, 1969); Walton Bean, “Florence Prag Kahn,” in Notable American Women 21 22 23 24 25

12. Jewish Republicanism and City Politics: The San Francisco Experienc

From 1911 to 1963, a number of other Jewish Republicans were elected to public office in San Francisco as well. After Julius Kahn, the most prominent Jewish Republican figure of this period was undoubtedly Jessie Colman, who served on the Board of Supervisors for twenty-six years, following his initial appointment by Republican Mayor James Rolph, Jr. in 1921.27 When he voluntarily retired from the board in 1947,28 Colman—who served as acting mayor of the city five times during his tenure on the board—had held elective office for more years, consecutively, than any other Jew in San Francisco history. One of San Francisco’s most beloved and popular figures, Colman, at the age of eightytwo, was reappointed to the board by Mayor George Christopher in 1961 to fill out the unexpired term of Supervisor Alphonso J. Zirpoli who had been appointed a Federal judge.29 Colman coupled his political career with a distinguished record of Jewish community service. A key officer to the Jewish Welfare Board for thirty-six years and a leading member of Temple Emanu-El, where his grandfather, Dr. Elkan Cohn, had served as rabbi in 1860–1889, Colman was also a board member of the Jewish Welfare Fund and the Jewish Community Relations Council. As devotedly as he [Colman] served his city for 26 years as a leading member of the Board of Supervisors, he was equally concerned with the welfare of his fellow Jews. Often he was called on by the Jewish Community Relations Council for help and advice. He never failed. No task was too great or too time-consuming. . . . For years he served [the Jewish community] with the same dedication to service and high ideals that marked his career in public service.30

27

28

29 30

1607–1950, ed. Edward T. James, Janet Wilson James and Paul S. Boyer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:302–303. Carolyn Anspacher, “Jessie Colman, San Francisco Political Patriarch, Dies at 87,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 9, 1966, 35. See also “Supervisor Jessie Colman is Re-elected by Heavy Vote,” Emanu-EI and the Jewish Record Journal, November 8, 1935, 2. A resolution honoring Colman passed by the Board of Supervisors following his retirement read in part as follows: “Regardless of political or other philosophies, not without a keen sense of honest regret do the people and members of official San Francisco witness the retirement from public office of such a personality as Jessie C. Colman from the legislative halls of the City and County of San Francisco, this Board of Supervisors . . . earnestly endeavors to express to him the very high respect in which he is and has been held—the deep affection, which is felt for him and the poignant sense of regret which his leaving occasions” (Resolution no. 7127, presented at meeting of the Board of Supervisors, January 5, 1948). Ibid. “Resolution in the Memory of Jessie Colman,” adopted by the Jewish Community Relations Council, August 9, 1966.

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Often mentioned as a possible candidate for mayor, Colman preferred the part-time public duties of the Board of Supervisors—as compared to the more full-time responsibilities of the mayoralty—which gave him the necessary leisure to devote to his business interests and to his Jewish communal activities and commitments.31 The 1911–1963 period was, as we noted, an era of Republican hegemony in San Francisco politics. Jewish office holders, such as Colman, B. J. Feigenbaum, Jefferson Peyser, Albert C. Wollenberg,32 and, most notably, Edgar C. Levey, who served as speaker of the Assembly for three terms, found a natural home in the Republican Party. Moreover, the Republican mayors of this era gave the Jewish community a greater degree of political recognition in the form of appointments to city boards and commissions than it had ever heretofore known. The Republican mayors and their staffs cultivated and maintained a close working relationship with Jewish communal leaders such as Colman, Jessie Steinhart, Walter Haas, and Daniel Koshland. Mayor Rolph, the first “mayor of all the people,” to use Moses Rischin’s aptly descriptive phrase, was the first San Francisco chief executive to establish close ties with the organized Jewish community and its leaders and to actively solicit the advice of Jewish business and communal leaders at City Hall. While in office, Rolph was the first mayor to extend the same public recognition to Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur as had been accorded to Good Friday, and, in an unusual gesture, was elected an honorary member of a synagogue.33 After Rolph’s election as California’s governor in 1930, Jewish leaders transferred their loyalty and political support to Rolph’s heir apparent, former Supervisor Angelo Rossi, who, with Colman’s active assistance, had been chosen by the board to be Rolph’s successor. Rossi, like Rolph, continued to actively solicit local Jewish political and financial support. Since the Rolph administration (1911–1930) at least, decisions on appointments in San Francisco have always been weighted heavily with ethnic and

31 Interview with Eugene B. Block, former executive director of Jewish Community Relations Council. 32 See, for example, “Elected to Supervisorial Board: Jefferson E. Peyser,” Emanu-EI, November 15, 1929, 3. Wollenberg, first elected to the Assembly in 1939, resigned his seat to accept a judgeship in 1947: “Wollenberg is Named New S.F. Judge,” San Francisco Jewish·Community Bulletin, July 4, 1947, 1. 33 Moses Rischin, “Sunny Jim Rolph: The First Mayor of All the People,” California Historical Quarterly 53 (Summer 1974): 170.

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religious considerations.34 These decisions, made with the intent of accommodating to some degree the varying ethnic groups comprising the San Francisco electorate, have provided one of the main vehicles for Jewish representation and participation in the politics and government of San Francisco. During the 1930s and 1940s, Jews held the presidencies of the Board of Education, Art, Fire, and Library Commissions, and many other appointive posts as well. As one observer of that period suggested, “in filling of public and quasi-public posts, there seems to have been no trace of a policy of exclusion . . . or even discriminatory hesitation,”35 as far as the Jewish community was concerned. Individual Jews were strong supporters of the mayors at whose pleasure these appointments were made. Banker Herbert Fleishhacker had been a close confidante and leading fundraiser for Mayor Rolph and continued in this role during the administration of Rolph’s political ally and successor, Mayor Angelo Rossi. Fleishhacker, serving on both the Recreation and Art Commissions and one of Mayor Rossi’s most trusted advisors, remained, throughout the 1930s and 1940s, one of the most influential men in city government.36 Other prominent Jewish communal figures played significant roles in Mayor Rossi’s administration as well. I. W. Hellman, Jr., president of the Wells Fargo Bank and Union Trust Company, Supreme Court Justice Marcus Sloss, attorney Jessie Steinhart, and Levi Strauss & Company President Walter Haas, all had “the ear of the mayor” and remained staunch and loyal supporters of the new Republican administration. Hellman, Fleishhacker, Haas, and especially Steinhart played important roles as political fundraisers as well. While never seeking political office themselves, they tried to encourage and facilitate the candidacies of others in the community. Steinhart, for example, the son of pioneer merchant William Steinhart and, for many years, the attorney “to whom the city government turned when they had a legal nut to crack,”37 never aspired to public office himself, but rather “believed in seeking out good people from within the Jewish community whom

34 On Rolph, see ibid., 165–172; on the role of ethnic considerations during the Schmitz-Ruef administration, see James P. Walsh, “Abe Ruef Was No Boss.” 35 Raab, “There’s No City like San Francisco: Profile of a Jewish Community,” 78. 36 David Wooster Taylor, The Life of James Rolph Jr. (San Francisco, CA: Committee for the Publication of the Life of James Rolph Jr., 1934), 90. 37 Interview with Samuel Ladar, former law partner of Jessie Steinhart. Biographical material on Steinhart can be found in Michael M. Zarchin, Glimpses of Jewish Life in San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: Judah L. Magnes Museum, 1964), 26–27.

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he could help financially . . . to get elected. That was his modus operandi.”38 At least two Jewish elected officials of the Rossi era, Albert C. Wollenberg and B. J. Feigenbaum, were initially encouraged to go into politics by Steinhart. To their campaigns, as well as to those of Jessie Colman and Jefferson Peyser, Steinhart, Fleishhacker, and Haas all contributed generously. Mayor Rossi, especially, was notably indebted to families such as the Fleishhackers, Haases, and Steinharts for their gifts and bequests to the city. An impressive number of public pools, parks, libraries, museums, and halls bearing familiar Jewish names were financed and built during Rolph’s last years and the early years of the Rossi administration. Herbert Fleishhacker alone donated hundreds of thousands of dollars toward playground and park improvements, including the famous public outdoor swimming pool, which bore his name. Recreation commissioner Mrs. Sigmund Stern, mother-in-law of Walter Haas and an old friend and supporter of Rossi’s from the days when they had served together on the commission, presented the magnificent Sigmund Stern Grove to the city as a memorial to her husband to be used as a recreation spot under the jurisdiction and control of the city’s Recreation Department. In 1938, Mrs. Stern organized and financed the Sigmund Stern Grove Festival Committee, whose purpose was to provide outstanding outdoor symphony, opera, ballet, drama, and concert performances free, and which quickly became one of the most popular forms of cultural entertainment in the city.39 Rossi could offer one specific form of reward in return for their philanthropy and political support: appointment to municipal office. Rossi, like his mentor before him, tended to classify the electorate by ethnic origin and to dispense rewards accordingly. Yet Rossi had even closer ties and a better rapport with the Jewish community and its leadership than did Rolph, whose base and personal allegiances remained primarily within the Irish community. These strong ties may be attributed to two factors. As a Republican, Rossi had the backing of most of the leadership of the organized Jewish community, which was strongly Republican.40 As an Italian, Rossi, like his Jewish backers, was a member of an ethnic minority that was just beginning to receive political recognition in a city government still controlled primarily by Irish politicians.41 Whatever the 38 39 40 41

lnterview with Samuel Ladar. Gertrude Atherton, My San Francisco (New York: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1946), 166–167. Raab, “There’s No City like San Francisco: Profile of a Jewish Community,” 89. On the role of Italians and the Irish in San Francisco politics, see Frederick M. Wirt, Power in the City: Decision-Making in San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: University of Cali-

12. Jewish Republicanism and City Politics: The San Francisco Experienc

explanation, the Rossi administration was the heyday of Jewish influence in appointive politics in San Francisco. Prior to 1930, Jews had been receiving approximately five to fifteen percent of the mayor’s appointments.42 Thereafter, thanks to Rossi’s appointment pattern, Jewish representation entered a new and, until the 1960s, relatively stable phase when twenty-five to thirty percent of board and commission positions were occupied by Jews.43 lt was, as one observer has put it, a “Golden Age” for Jewish appointments in San Francisco, which could not be matched in any other American city.44 The pattern of appointments set by Rossi would continue through the administrations of his successors, Mayors Lapham, Robinson, and Christopher, who each appointed a comparable number of Jews. Equally significant, certain unwritten traditions were inaugurated during the early years of the Rossi regime that provided for Jewish representation on selected boards and commissions. From the early 1930s until 1972 it was traditional to have two Jewish seats on the Board of Education; there was, until 1968, a traditional “Jewish seat” on the Police Commission; and the Art and Library Commissions came to be thought of as quasi-Jewish domains. For a half-century until 1972, San Francisco’s public schools were governed by a seven-member Board of Education appointed by the mayor. As Joseph Cronin has noted, one characteristic of appointive boards “is the tendency to develop ‘seats’ for special interests, especially organized labor [and] the three major religions.”45 The development of, and continual provision for, such special seats was a traditional feature of school board politics since the reorganization of the San Francisco school system in 1921.46

42

43 44 45 46

fornia Press, 1974). On the Irish in particular, see James P. Walsh, ed., The San Francisco Irish 1850–1976 (San Francisco, CA: The Irish Literary and Historical Society, 1978). These are the author’s own calculations based on the number of Jewish members of major boards and commissions at four- or five-year intervals between 1902 and 1926. Data comes from San Francisco Municipal Reports and from Blake, San Francisco and its Municipal Administration, 1902. These commissions are: Art, Civil Service, Fire, Police, Public Utilities, Recreation, the Housing Authority, Board of Permit Appeals, and Board of Education. Interview with Earl Raab, Executive Director of Jewish Community Relations Council. Joseph M. Cronin, The Control of Urban Schools (New York: The Free Press, 1973), 230. For a discussion of the 1921 reorganization of the San Francisco school system, see Lee S. Dolson, “The Administration of the San Francisco Public Schools, 1847–1947” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1964).

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Much of the impetus for this reorganization, and for the religiously balanced school board, which evolved in the years ahead, came from the long simmering Protestant and Jewish fear of Catholic control of public school education in San Francisco. Prior to 1921, the San Francisco schools had been dominated by an elected superintendent, virtually unaccountable to the weak four-member board appointed by the mayor. In an era of Irish Catholic domination of electoral politics in San Francisco, it was inevitable that the elected Superintendent of Schools would be Catholic.47 Amendment 37 (the School reorganization amendment) to the city charter, proposed by civic and educational reform groups48 whose leaders were largely Protestants and Jews, was designed to eliminate the “elective superintendency” and to vest greater powers in an enlarged Board of Education under whose direct authority and supervision the superintendent and other personnel would administer the schools. Underlying these changes, however, was the desire to delimit Catholic control. As Lee Dolson has noted concerning the motivations behind Amendment 37: “Though ostensibly designed to usher in a transition from political control of the administration of the schools to an appointive . . . superintendency, this change in basic San Francisco law had the incidental effect of ridding the city of what some citizens thought was a serious threat—the seemingly perpetual incumbency of a Roman Catholic Superintendent.”49 Moreover, the expansion of the board from four to seven members—together with the subsequent appointment policies of Mayors Rolph and Rossi—began the institutionalization of Jewish and Protestant representation and influence on what was, heretofore, a predominantly Catholic board. The increase in the size of the board to seven made it easier for mayors to balance the religious and ethnic composition of the board, while providing for representation from the ranks of labor as well. Wallace Sayre and Herbert Kaufman have speculated that the ethnic and religious balance serves to control competition and prevent conflict between the major ethnic and religious 47 Of Alfred Roncovieri, superintendent in 1905–1922, it was said, for example: “Roncovieri was known to be a man of culture . . . moreover, he was a Roman Catholic in a city where this was a very important political asset.” Dolson, “The Administration of the San Francisco Public Schools,” 356. 48 Such as the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, the League of Women Voters, and others. On the League’s interest in, and support of, the charter amendment, see Phyllis Levy, The League of Women Voters of San Francisco: History (1911–1974) (San Francisco, CA: League of Women Voters of San Francisco, 1975), 6. 49 Dolson, “The Administration of the San Francisco Public Schools,” 436–437.

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groups in a cosmopolitan city.50 Provision for a religiously balanced board certainly served such a function in San Francisco. San Francisco during the 1920s and the 1930s was still very much a Catholic city. Since before the turn of the century, Catholics had controlled the school board, the superintendency, and the public school bureaucracy, as they did all the other departments of city government. More and more, during the years 1900–1920, there was a growing resentment of this Catholic hegemony over the policy and administration of the city’s public schools. The sons and daughters of San Francisco’s Irish Catholic political leaders and city administrators attended not the city’s public schools but rather a parallel parochial school system of their own.51 Until the 1950s, it has been estimated, the great majority of Catholic children—well over one-third of all the school-age children in San Francisco—were enrolled in Catholic parochial schools.52 With their own children in private schools—and, hence, with no vested interest in the future and direction of the public school system—it was assumed that the Irish Catholic politicians on the school board could have no personal commitment to, and thus could not really be working in the best interests of, quality public school education in San Francisco. Creating a religiously balanced school board, moreover, assuaged the fears of the Protestant and Jewish communities, who were apprehensive that the Roman Catholic Archbishop might seek through his parishioners on the school board, to influence public school educational policy and programs in a direction that might threaten the religious freedom of non-Catholic school children. There was also the concern that he might influence the distribution of educational jobs. Since the Irish Catholics controlled city government and politics, municipal jobs were—prior to the adoption of the 1932 charter and the institutionalization of the merit system within civil service employment—a tangible 50 Wallace S. Sayre and Herbert Kaufman, Governing New York City (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1960), 283. 51 Growing up Catholic in San Francisco, “one identified oneself not as being from the Richmond District, or the Sunset, or Potrero Hill, but by parish. You attended Mass there on Sunday . . . your children went to the parish grammar school. . . . For the boys, high school meant Sacred Heart, St. Ignatius, or Riordan, schools conducted respectively by the Christian Brothers, the Jesuits, and the Brothers of Mary. Girls had a much wider selection: St. Rose’s, the Convent of the Sacred Heart, Presentation, . . . St. Vincent’s, . . . Star of the Sea. . . . It was a complete and encompassing world.” Kevin Starr, “I Grew Up Catholic in San Francisco. Quite Frankly, It Was the Best Thing That Could Have Happened to Me,” City Magazine, San Francisco, October 21, 1975, 22. 52 Interview with Mrs. Ernest Lilienthal, former member of Board of Education, and a president of the League of Women Voters during the 1950s.

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political resource, which they could freely dispense as political rewards and favors. Irish Catholic control of the school board meant leverage over the distribution of jobs within the school department and throughout the public schools. In an era in which the Roman Catholic Archbishop was generally thought to be a de facto member of the mayor’s cabinet,53 such fears concerning the influence of the Catholic Church in local political affairs, while certainly exaggerated, were, nonetheless, fairly widespread. A religiously balanced school board would serve the function of minimizing distrust and resolving existing problems (and potential conflicts) between Protestants, Jews, and Catholics over the issue of who would control the city’s public schools. Equal representation of all three groups on the Board of Education would, it was believed, ensure that no rival group enjoyed greater access to the channels of communication and structures of educational policy making and decisions.54 The composition of the new “reorganized” Board of Education, which took office on January 8, 1922, is of interest because it set a pattern for such appointments which was largely followed for the next fifty years. The seven-member board included three Protestants, two Catholics, two Jews, and one representative of Labor.55 By the time San Francisco adopted its new charter in 1932— embodying the changes introduced by Amendment 37—this formula for board appointments already had about it the aura of precedent. Since that time, “a member’s successor has usually been chosen with an eye toward continuation of the interests of the segment of the citizenry that he or she particularly represented.”56 From the early years of the Rossi administration onwards, as vacancies occurred on the board, the replacements were of the same religion as their predecessors—Protestant replaced Protestant, and Jew replaced Jew. When the two “Jewish seats” occupied by Alfred Esberg and Mary Goldsmith Prag were vacated in 1932 and 1935, Mayor Rossi, without hesitation, replaced them with Jewish communal leaders Philip L. Bush and Mrs. Lloyd W. 53 Starr, “I Grew Up Catholic,” 23. 54 “It gives the people a feeling of unity,” said Dr. Harold Spears, a former superintendent of schools and a firm believer in a religiously balanced board. “All the various interest groups are represented. This builds security and helps develop popular support for the Board.” Quoted in Peter Binzen, “How to Pick a School Board,” Saturday Review, April 17, 1965, 72–73. 55 One of the seven members would also always be a woman. This stipulation, unlike the others, was actually formally incorporated into the new city charter in 1932. For much of the elective board’s history, two women have served simultaneously on the board. For thirty-eight of the fifty years, one of the Jewish community’s two “representatives” has been a woman. 56 Dolson, “The Administration of the San Francisco Public Schools,” 440.

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Dinkelspiel respectively. By this time, an unofficial understanding had been reached by City Hall politicians and Jewish communal leaders whereby these two seats should always remain “reserved” for Jewish appointees.”57 Mayor Rossi’s successor, Mayor Lapham, honored this agreement, as did his successor, Mayor Robinson, after him. This tradition of two “Jewish seats” would continue, unbroken, until the change to an elected Board of Education in 1972.58 To San Francisco’s Jewish community, these “Jewish seats” came to be regarded as traditional communal possessions, positions of access and influence to which San Francisco Jews customarily were entitled. What Sayre and Kaufman have suggested concerning ethnic stakes in certain appointive positions in New York City is equally applicable to San Francisco as well: “Ethnic . . . associations concentrate more upon general claims for ‘recognition’ and ‘balanced representation’ in appointments than in influencing appointments to particular positions, although once such recognition is obtained in a particular office the ethnic . . . group is likely to regard it as a permanent acquisition of the group.”59 Between the 1930s and 1960s, San Francisco Jewry came, increasingly, to regard these two Jewish board seats as the “permanent acquisition” of their particular ethnic group. The first two Jewish appointees, Mrs. Prag, a public school teacher for more than forty years (and the mother-in-law of Congressman Julius Kahn), and Alfred Esberg, prominent merchant and member of a pioneer German-Jewish family, shared a common interest and active involvement in the organizational life and concerns of the San Francisco Jewish community.60 Esberg, as Michael Zarchin has noted, exerted “a profound influence on many Jewish organiza57 “Theoretically,” writes Binzen, “the mayor has a completely free hand to pick the most qualified San Franciscans for the School Board.” Actually, however, his appointments have been “tightly controlled by what is known locally as the ‘gentleman’s agreement.’ Under this unwritten rule, San Francisco’s Board of Education must consist of three Protestants, two Catholics, and two Jews. . . . It . . . has been followed unwaveringly except for a brief period when only one Catholic sat on the Board.” Binzen, “How to Pick a School Board,” 72. 58 The change to an elected Board of Education in i972, and the effect of this change, at least potentially, on Jewish representation on the board is discussed in David G. Dalin, Public Affairs and the Jewish Community: The Changing Political World of San Francisco Jews (PhD diss., Brandeis University, Waltham, MA, 1977), 244–252. 59 Sayre and Kaufman, Governing New York City, 221. 60 “S.E. Jewry Represented in List of School Appointments,” Emanu-EI, September 2, 1921, 4; and “Mrs. Prag and Alfred Esberg Now on School Board,” Emanu-El, January 13, 1922, 4. The data on the members of the Board of Education is from Members of the Board of Education, 1851–1964, compiled by Boyd M. Wales, made available by the San Francisco Board of Education; and from Zarchin, Glimpses of Jewish Life.

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tions; he was president of the Hebrew Orphan Asylum, San Francisco Federation of Jewish Charities, and San Francisco Committee for Aid to Refugees.”61 Mrs. Prag, whose husband had been a founder of Temple Sherith Israel, was an active board member of that temple, the Jewish Educational Society, and other communal bodies as well. From these first appointments, it seems there was an implicit understanding between the mayor and his staff and the organized Jewish community that leadership in Jewish communal affairs would be an unofficial prerequisite for appointment to one of the Jewish seats on the board. When Esberg resigned from the board in 1932, he was replaced by business executive Philip Lee Bush, who, as director of Temple Emanu-El, Mt. Zion Hospital, and the Jewish Community Center, was a Jewish communal leader of some renown. Likewise, the vacancy created with Mrs. Prag’s death in 1935 was filled by Mrs. Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel, a member of one of the city’s most prominent and respected Jewish families.62 The granddaughter of Wells Fargo Bank founder I. W. Hellman63 and the daughter of banker and mayoral advisor I. W. Hellman, Jr., her husband was a partner in the politically influential law firm of Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe,64 and would serve, in later years, as president of the San Francisco Bar Association and of the Stanford University Board of Trustees.65 Together with her family’s impeccable political and social connections— the Dinkelspiels, according to social commentator Stephen Birmingham, are very much part of San Francisco’s “high society”66—her husband’s and her own active role in Jewish communal life was one further and important factor recommending her appointment. Widely acknowledged to be one of the two or three 61 Zarchin, Glimpses of Jewish Life, 16. 62 “Mrs. Florence Dinkelspiel Appointed Member of Board of Education,” Emanu-EI and the Jewish Record, April 19, 1935, 38. As the San Francisco Chronicle noted, at thirty years of age, Mrs. Dinkelspiel was the youngest person ever appointed to the board. “Takes Office,” San Francisco Chronicle, April 17, 1935, 17. 63 Biographical material on Hellman can be found in Norton B. Stern, “Toward a Biography of Isaias W. Hellman—Pioneer Builder of California,” Western States Jewish Historical Quarterly 3 (October 1969): 27–44. 64 A Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe partner during the 1950s and 1960s was Caspar W. Weinberger, a member of San Francisco State Assembly and cochairman of the California Republican Central Committee, who left San Francisco to become Governor Ronald Reagan’s state director of finance and, in 1970, a member of the Nixon administration. 65 See, for example, “Dinkelspiel Named Stanford Trustee,” The San Francisco Jewish Community Bulletin, July 4, 1947, 1. 66 Stephen Birmingham, The Right People: A Portrait of the American Social Establishment (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1968), 24.

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most influential communal figures of his generation,67 Lloyd W. Dinkelspiel served, at one time or another, as president of the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, Temple Emanu-El, the Jewish National Welfare Fund,68 and the Jewish Welfare Federation. Moreover, Mrs. Dinkelspiel was, in her own right, a board member or officer of a half-dozen Jewish organizations. In appointing Mrs. Dinkelspiel, Mayor Rossi continued the precedent begun by Mayor Rolph of naming an individual with close ties to the leadership of the organized Jewish community. Through the administration of Mayor John Shelley, each succeeding mayor remained faithful to this precedent, and appointed only individuals with some prior leadership role in Jewish communal affairs. By the late 1950s, the long Jewish and non-partisan Republican hegemony began to come apart. The emergence of a Democratic Club movement now came to supply the base for two-party competition that was energized by changed electoral laws, new issues, and the coming of age of a radically changed electorate.69 In 1958, the election of Stanley Mosk, a Superior Court judge and Jewish communal leader in Los Angeles, to the office of State Attorney General alongside Edmund (Pat) Brown as governor opened the way for a new Democratic era in city and state politics. The new largely Jewish Golden Gate Democratic Club which had campaigned vigorously for Mosk, the first Jew to win statewide elective office, helped provide the organizational base for continued Jewish participation in grass roots Democratic politics in San Francisco. With the election in 1963 of Mayor John Shelley, the first Democrat to occupy that office in over half a century, an era had come to an end.

67 Most of the people interviewed for this study mentioned Dinkelspiel, Jessie Steinhart, and Walter Haas as the most influential Jewish communal figures of the 1930–1960 period. 68 The Jewish National Welfare Fund was organized in 1925 to coordinate local fundraising for national and overseas Jewish organizations and causes. The Federation of Jewish Charities, which had been established in 1910, continued to exist as the central body designated to raise and disburse communal funds for specifically local agencies arid services. In 1955, the Federation of Jewish Charities and the Jewish National Welfare Fund were merged into one community-wide “umbrella” organization, the Jewish Welfare Federation. 69 Analysis of these events may be found in Francis Carney, The Rise of the Democratic Clubs in California (New York: Holt, 1958); Royce D. Delmatier, “The Rebirth of the Democratic Party in California” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, CA, 1955); Joseph P. Harris, California Politics (San Francisco, CA: Chandler, 1967); and Robert J. Pitchell, “The Electoral System and Voting Behavior: The Case of California’s Cross-Filing,” Western Political Quarterly 12, no. 2 ( June 1959): 459–484.

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In the years ahead, Jews would participate in politics more often as Democrats than as Republicans. Yet the tradition of Jewish non-partisan Republicanism continued to leave its mark on the political life of the city. Ever since his election, first to the Assembly in 1958 and then to the Senate in 1966, the genial presence in Sacramento of San Francisco’s Milton Marks has been a constant reminder of the durability of a political style symbolized by “Sunny” Jim Rolph, who over sixty years earlier had appointed the senator’s father, Milton Marks, Sr., to the city’s Board of Supervisors.

13

From Marxism to Judaism: Will Herberg in Retrospect* I Very few people today remember who Will Herberg was. If his name is recognized at all, it is probably as the author of Protestant-Catholic-Jew (1955), a popular evocation of America’s “triple melting pot” whose thesis has become a part of the sociological language of our time. Yet Herberg, who died in 1977, was undeniably one of the most interesting Jewish intellectuals of the last halfcentury, and one, moreover, whose journey from Marxism to Judaism, and from the political Left to the political Right, resonates with peculiar aptness today. The recent publication of Harry J. Ausmus’s book-length study of Herberg’s writings1 affords an opportunity to ponder the life and thought of this once better-known figure. Herberg was born in 1901, in the same Russian village in which his father had been born before him. By the time his family arrived in the United States, in 1904, Herberg’s parents, whom he would later describe as “passionate atheists,” were already committed to the faith that mankind’s salvation lay in socialism. Curiously, both his father, who died when Herberg was ten, and his mother, held the American public-school system in “contempt.” Although he attended Brooklyn’s Public School 72 and Boys High, Herberg’s real education took place at his parents’ kitchen table. A precocious and versatile student, by the time he was a teenager Herberg had learned Greek, Latin, French, German, and Russian. Graduating from high school in 1918, he later attended CCNY and Columbia

* 1

“Will Herberg in Retrospect” was published in the July 1988 issue of Commentary. Reprinted by permission of Commentary magazine. Harry J. Ausmus, Will Herberg: From Right to Right, foreword by Martin E. Marty (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987).

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University, where he studied philosophy and history, apparently without ever completing the course work for an academic degree. Herberg inherited and acted upon his parents’ commitments. Entering the Communist movement while still a teenager, he subsequently brought to radical politics a theoretical erudition that, through his contributions to left-wing journals in the 1920s and early 1930s, helped to elevate the intellectual standards of American Marxism. While less prolific than Max Eastman or the novelist John Dos Passos, Herberg was perhaps the most “catholic” of Marxist polemicists, writing regularly on an amazingly diverse number of topics, from Edmund Wilson’s views of proletarian literature, to Sidney Hook’s explication of Marx on revolution, to the relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and Communist thought. Herberg’s attachment to Communism was no mere affectation; so earnestly did he embrace the Marxist “faith” that, as Ausmus points out, he even sought to square it with Einstein’s theory of relativity. Indeed, perhaps his boldest contribution to the radical thought of the period lay in his effort to reconcile Marxism with, on the one hand, the new Einsteinian cosmology, which had gone virtually unnoticed among radical writers in America, and, on the other hand, with Freudianism. For Herberg, both Marxism and the theory of relativity were “scientifically true,” and as for Freudianism, he wrote in the 1930s that the “world of socialism—to which nothing human is alien and which cherishes every genuine manifestation of the human spirit—lays a wreath of homage on the grave of Sigmund Freud.” In the 1920s Herberg’s allegiances within the Communist movement lay with the group headed by Jay Lovestone, followers and supporters of Bukharin, who were eventually to be ousted from the party by Stalin in 1929. At that point Herberg became a staff member and editor of the Lovestonite paper, Workers Age, many of whose contributors would later become bitter anti-Stalinists. As the 1930s progressed, however, Herberg found himself increasingly disenchanted not just with the party but with Marxism itself. There were the usual milestones along the path: the Stalinist purges, the Communist betraval of the Popular Front during the Spanish Civil War, the Russian invasion of Finland, and especially the Stalin-Hitler nonaggression pact of 1939. For Herberg, as for many of his generation, this last dispelled any remaining belief that “only a socialist government can defeat totalitarianism.” But his final break with orthodox Marxism represented more than just a change in political loyalties. As he would confess years later, Marxism had been, to him and to others like him, “a religion, an ethic, and a theology; a vast

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all-embracing doctrine of man and the universe, a passionate faith with meaning.” Not that Herberg was about to abandon the values that had first attracted him to revolutionary activity. Rather, “My discovery was that I could no longer find basis and support for these ideals in the materialistic religion of Marxism. . . .” Something else was wanted to replace the failed god of Marxism and to fill the inner spiritual void, which had left Herberg “deprived of the commitment and understanding that alone made life livable.” It was then he chanced to read Reinhold Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society, a book that was profoundly to change the course of his life. More than any other American thinker of the 1930s and 1940s, Niebuhr related theology to politics through a realistic assessment of human nature that seemed, and not just to Will Herberg alone, inescapably relevant in a time of the breakdown of the Communist faith. In the writings of Niebuhr, Herberg discovered a compelling theological position from which to derive his own postMarxist, but still essentially liberal, faith. “Humanly speaking,” he would later write, Niebuhr’s work “converted me, for in some manner I cannot describe, I felt my whole being, and not merely my thinking, shifted to a new center. . . . What impressed me most profoundly was the paradoxical combination of realism and radicalism that Niebuhr’s ‘prophetic’ faith made possible. . . . Here, in short, was a ‘social idealism’ without illusions, in comparison with which even the most ‘advanced’ Marxism appeared confused, inconsistent, and hopelessly illusion-ridden.” So thoroughly did Herberg fall under the spell of Niebuhr’s thought that by the time he met him personally—Niebuhr was then teaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York—he was contemplating becoming a Christian. After several discussions with Niebuhr, Herberg did in fact declare his intention to convert, but Niebuhr counseled him instead to explore his own religious tradition first, and directed him across the street to the Jewish Theological Seminary. There, Herberg undertook instruction in Hebrew and Jewish thought. Herberg was inspired by what he learned. In Judaism he found, after years of searching, a faith that encouraged social action without falling into the trap of utopianism—and also, more importantly, a religious edifice that satisfied his own hunger for orthodoxy. Throughout the 1940s, while earning a living as the educational director of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, Herberg met regularly with rabbis and students at the seminary and at his own home, developing and explicating his emerging theology of Judaism. “In those early days,” says one of those students, “when the naturalistic theology so brilliantly expounded by Professor Mordecai Kaplan was the main intellectual in-

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fluence in Jewish religious circles, we were fascinated by Herberg’s espousal of the orthodox ideas of a supernatural God, Messiah, and Torah, expounded with fervor and yet interpreted in a new way.” Out of these intellectual encounters, and out of several essays published in Commentary and elsewhere in the late 1940s, came Herberg’s first major work, Judaism and Modern Man, an interpretation of Judaism in the light of existentialist philosophy, which appeared in 1951 and was highly praised by Jewish scholars. (Niebuhr himself believed that the book “may well become a milestone in the religious thought of America.”) Although Judaism and Modern Man made Herberg’s reputation as a theologian, it did not lead to the academic position that he then actively sought for himself. After 1948, when his duties with the ILGWU diminished, he offered courses on a part-time basis at the New School for Social Research, served briefly as the editor of the new quarterly journal Judaism, but earned much of his income from freelance articles and reviews and from lectures on college campuses and to synagogue and church groups far and wide. At least some of his energies were also devoted to the research and writing of Protestant-Catholic-Jew, which, upon its publication in 1955, brought Herberg the recognition he had long sought and a full-time academic appointment at Drew University, a Methodist institution in New Jersey, where he would teach until his retirement in 1976. When Herberg published Judaism and Modern Man, he still considered himself very much a liberal, albeit of the fervently anti-Communist variety. Throughout the first half of the 1950s he continued to publish regularly in the New Republic, New Leader, Commentary, and Christian Century. As the decade wore on, however, Herberg began increasingly to identify himself with political conservatism. He became part of that remarkable group of ex-Communists and ex-Trotskyists around William F. Buckley, Jr.’s National Review, a group that included James Burnham, Willmoore Kendall, Frank Meyer, Freda Utley, Max Eastman, and Whittaker Chambers. As religion editor of National Review, and as a frequent contributor to other conservative journals like Intercollegiate Review and Modern Age, Herberg spent the ensuing years calling repeatedly for a reassessment of the prevailing liberal consensus concerning church-state separation, and, more generally, for a positive role for religion in American life.

II By the time of his death in March 1977, Will Herberg was nowhere near so well known as he had been fifteen or twenty years earlier. The grip over American

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intellectual life that the Left had achieved in the 60s was only just beginning to show perceptible signs of loosening, while the neoconservative movement, which Herberg (despite his negative attitude toward Zionism and Israel) in many ways presaged, was still in the process of consolidation. Added to this was the fact that Herberg was not easily classifiable as a thinker. A Jewish theologian, a sociologist of American religion, a political conservative—he eluded the usual categories. Today, although Protestant-Catholic-Jew is still considered, among those who know it, a classic work in American religious sociology, and although some historians (like George H. Nash) regard Herberg as an important architect of conservative thought in the postwar period, in general his influence and his legacy remain opaque. Unfortunately, Harry Ausmus’s intellectual biography does not do much to clarify matters. Useful for its detailed review of Herberg’s writings, the study disappoints as a critical evaluation of his thought. To be fair, Ausmus himself notes in his preface that all he is attempting here is “an objective and mostly uncritical presentation.” Still, so objective and so uncritical is this survey that it offers the reader little if any true understanding of its subject. Ausmus fails, for example, to place Judaism and Modern Man within the broader framework of the “new Jewish theology” of the 1950s or of other significant trends and developments in postwar thought. Nor does he analyze Herberg’s role as a conservative political intellectual from the perspective of the emerging “New Conservatism” of the 1950s or of the National Review circle. Though early in the book he presents a kind of “who’s who” of the American intellectual Left, as seen through Herberg’s experience of it, the latter part of the book contains no comparable portrayal of the dominant personalities and issues of the postwar American Right. Throughout, there is no discussion whatsoever of what other scholars—including John P. Diggins, George H. Nash, Seymour Siegel, Arthur A. Cohen, and Judd Teller—have written about Herberg. Nor does the book succeed as a biography. Some of the details of Herberg’s life “had to be deleted for reasons of economy,” and the reader gets little insight into Herberg’s personality or character. Although Herberg was by all accounts a brilliant and impassioned teacher, Ausmus tells us nothing about his career at Drew, where he was lionized by students and professors alike. On the psychological level, Ausmus also scants the very curious and perplexing questions of why Herberg, whom Martin Marty has called a “very skilled reinventor of his autobiography,” fabricated a college degree and a doctorate he never earned, and invented an American birthplace to obscure his East European origins. Furthermore, one gains almost no insight from Ausmus into Herberg’s relationship,

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such as it was, with the Jewish community, or into his positive aloofness from Zionism. To get at these questions, one needs to turn back to the work. In an article in Commentary in January 1947, “From Marxism to Judaism,” Herberg had called for “a great theological reconstruction” of Judaism, arising from the thought of such contemporary Catholic and Protestant figures as Jacques Maritain, Karl Barth, and Reinhold Niebuhr. Judaism and Modern Man represents Herberg’s own attempt to pursue this task of theological reconstruction by offering a new existentialist interpretation of historical Judaism as it is embodied in the biblical-rabbinic tradition. While the book deals systematically with God and man, reason and revelation, social ethics, the meaning of Torah, and the destiny of Israel, Herberg meant it to be more than a “neutral, objective handbook on the Jewish religion”; it was, in his own words, also “a confession of faith and declaration of total commitment” on the part of one “whose trust in the idols of modernity has broken down and who is now ready to listen to the message of faith.” At the time, Herberg’s existentialist approach struck a responsive chord among many, within the Jewish community and beyond, who were searching for “enlightened” forms of spiritual inspiration. Judaism and Modern Man was greeted with enthusiasm by respected Jewish reviewers; Rabbi Milton Steinberg went so far as to say that Herberg had written “the book of the generation on the Jewish religion.” Others, however, were less enthusiastic, and with reason. For one thing, Herberg’s theology seemed in crucial respects to owe more to Christianity than to Judaism. Thus, in Judaism and Modern Man, which he described as “avowedly Niebuhrian in temper and thought,” Herberg sought to formulate a “new Jewish theology” predicated upon a less optimistic image of man, upon a greater recognition of human sinfulness and human limitations. Elsewhere he wrote appreciatively of Niebuhr’s rediscovery of the classical doctrine of “original sin, which is one of the great facts of human life . . . at the root of man’s existentialist plight.” Yet, the doctrine of original sin as a theological category is neither inherent in nor central to Judaism. Even though one may discover, as Herberg does, passages from the Talmud that in isolation convey the impression of a sin-preoccupied culture, the overall emphasis of traditional Judaism is far from the theological pessimism to which Herberg, following Niebuhr and Paul Tillich, subscribes. As a result, whatever vogue it may have enjoyed at the time of publication, Judaism and Modem Man has had little to say over the years to Jews in search of fresh formulations of their faith. Moreover, those within the Jewish community who might have been attracted to the element of affirmation in Herberg were put off by his antipathetic

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views on Zionism and the state of Israel. Central to Herberg’s understanding is the notion that Jewish nationalism represents “the most radical perversion of the idea of Israel,” an idea that he connects instead with the “unperformed task” of redemption that the Jews are called upon to fulfill in the world. Ironically, this denigration of Jewish nationalism has more in common with the anti-Zionist ideology of classical Reform Judaism, which Herberg disdained, than with the neo-Orthodox religious thought of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig to which he so often paid homage. To compound the irony, this same concept of the “unperformed task,” of a special Jewish “mission” to the nations, served then and continues to serve as the rationale behind much of the Jewish political and theological radicalism of our time—the very sort of radicalism Will Herberg had come profoundly to reject. Whatever the reason, the state of Israel never played the role in Herberg’s religious thought that it did in that of Emil Fackenheim, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Mordecai Kaplan, and other postwar theologians. Quite the contrary: “For the state of Israel, however highly we may regard it,” maintained Herberg, “is, after all, but another community of this world. . . .” That he did not deem it necessary to revise these views even after the Six-Day War of 1967 remains one of the more curious facets of his intellectual career, and another wedge between him and otherwise sympathetic readers. Herberg’s theological writings, finally, had little impact within the secular world of which he had once been a part and to which he continued to address his appeals. His call in Commentary for “a great theological reconstruction” met with a positively inhospitable reception among his fellow Jewish ex-Marxists at Partisan Review and Dwight Macdonald’s magazine Politics. These were, for the most part, cultural modernists who had—to put it mildly—little interest in theological reflection and much less in personal affirmation of religious belief. To these secular critics, like Irving Howe, Herberg’s commitments bespoke a “new failure of nerve,” and his call for a religious revival represented “an escape from the responsibilities of political life and the uncertainties of worldly experience.” Sidney Hook and Daniel Bell also attacked Herberg’s belief that democracy rests on “religio-philosophical” truths about man’s fallibility, or that religion might offer a bulwark against totalitarianism. His “defeatist” retreat to religion found little support among most of the contributors to Partisan Review’s 1950 symposium on “Religion and the Intellectuals,” and not surprisingly, the appearance of Judaism and Modern Man the following year went unnoticed in Partisan Review and other important journals of the secular Left.

13. From Marxism to Judaism: Will Herberg in Retrospect

Herberg’s most famous book remains, unquestionably, the 1955 ProtestantCatholic-Jew. In writing it, he sought to account for a paradox. On the one hand, no culture had ever been so thoroughly committed to materialist consumption as was postwar America, a place where people lived as if religious teachings and spiritual values were nonexistent. On the other hand, all around one saw signs of religious revival, at least on a superficial level. There was the spectacular rise of Billy Graham; the addition of the phrase “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance; and the printing of “In God We Trust” on all US currency. President Eisenhower had unexpectedly opened his inaugural address with a prayer, and had given a nationally broadcast speech on the need for religious faith. The bestselling book in America in 1953 and 1954 was The Power of Positive Thinking, by the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale. Church construction was booming, and church membership rising dramatically. American Jews, too, seemed to be participating in this national religious revival. Postwar synagogue building eclipsed anything that had been seen in the 1920s and 1930s. New congregations sprang up all over the United States. The American-born children of Jews who had never thought about their Jewishness, or who had done so only to reject it, suddenly found themselves joining and even organizing synagogues in small towns and suburbia. To Herberg, all this suggested the formation of a society in which religious affiliation, rather than class or ethnicity, had become the primary social determinant. In order “to belong” in American society, one had to belong to a religious community. Moverover, contrary to established sociological belief, America was not one melting pot, but rather a triple melting pot; to be an American in the 1950s meant to be identified with one of the “three great religions of democracy”: Protestantism, Catholicism, Judaism. There is much that was, and is, striking in this thesis—not least, in retrospect, Herberg’s daring elevation of Judaism to coequal status in the national drama with the two great branches of Christianity. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that Herberg’s saying so helped in some measure to make it so: published on the heels of celebrations in 1954 of 300 years of Jewish settlement in North America, Protestant-Catholic-Jew 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. Nevertheless, Herberg’s analysis is open to serious question. His claims about the eclipse of ethnicity, for example, were hardly borne out by developments of the next two decades. “The perpetuation of ethnic differences in

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any serious way is altogether out of line with the logic of American reality,” he wrote in 1955, yet only a few years later Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan demonstrated, in Beyond the Melting Pot, the falsity of Herberg’s statement. Or again, for the sake of his overall analysis Herberg dismissed the fundamentalist Protestant “fringe” sects in the United States—“they become very minor denominations, hardly affecting the total picture”—despite the fact that during the 1950s close to ten million American Protestants were defining themselves as evangelical Christians, and even as Herberg was writing, new evangelical sects were arising and older ones were undergoing revitalization. Less than five years after the publication of Protestant-Catholic-Jew, the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset could note that such fundamentalist sects were “far stronger today than at any time in the 20th century,” and that the much-heralded growth in church membership was taking place precisely among these “fringe sects,” rather than within the traditional Protestant “mainline” denominations in which Herberg placed so much stock.

III If one tries to account for the peculiar lack of resonance of Will Herberg’s name today, these and other weaknesses in his work both as a theologian and as a sociologist must figure prominently. But to stop with those weaknesses is to miss what was fresh and even compelling about Herberg’s views at the time, and what still recommends them today. The glue that held it all together was Herberg’s emerging political conservatism. The touchstone of Herberg’s conservatism was a political historicism rooted in the conception of natural law as formulated by Edmund Burke (whom Herberg had begun to read at the suggestion of Niebuhr). Burkean conservatism regards traditional religion as the very basis of political culture, without which the maintenance of social order is an impossibility; drawing upon this view, Herberg argued for the necessity of religion as a “civilizing force,” one that would enable the American body politic to survive as a moral entity in the postwar world. It was Herberg’s neo-Burkean approach to matters of religion and state that led to his close association with National Review, and in particular to the conviction, shared with Whittaker Chambers, that the struggle between Soviet Communism and the free world was, in fact, the struggle of atheism against religion. At home, of course, the problem was not so much Communism as secular liberalism, and as the religion editor of National Review Herberg took it as his

13. From Marxism to Judaism: Will Herberg in Retrospect

special task to criticize systematically the established liberal consensus on issues of church and state; in so doing, he made probably his most significant contribution to postwar conservative thought. The position Herberg espoused was predicated on the argument that the authors of the Constitution never intended to erect a “wall of separation,” as I described in detail in chapter 10. Herberg was especially vocal in his criticism of liberal American Jews and their insistence that religion be kept rigidly distinct from public life. Needless to say, his warnings went generally unheeded within the Jewish community. Some Jewish leaders publicly dissociated themselves from Herberg’s views; in the words of one liberal critic, Herberg was “certainly the most stupid Jew I’ve ever heard of.” It has taken another two decades—which happened to be the politically and religiously fateful ones of the 1960s and 1970s—for Herberg’s critique of the secularizing tendencies of American Jewish liberalism to find wider echoes in the internal politics of the Jewish community (where, today, the influence of the Orthodox is anyway more strongly felt). Of course, much has intervened to make this argument a more respectable one, perhaps above all the willingness of many Americans of all denominations and walks of life to assert the link between public morality and religious belief. From a self-consciously Jewish standpoint, such figures as Irving Kristol, Murray Friedman, Milton Himmelfarb, and the late Seymour Siegel have argued forcefully that an American political culture uninformed by religious beliefs and institutions itself poses a danger to the position and the security of Jews. If even today this view can hardly be said to represent the mainstream Jewish consensus, which for the most part remains committed to the old doctrine of separatism, at least it commands greater intellectual force and weight than ever before. In this it owes something, however unrecognized and unacknowledged, to the example of Will Herberg.

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The Jewish Historiography of Hannah Arendt* Introduction Few theories of Jewish history have been as controversial as Hannah Arendt’s thesis of the fundamentally unpolitical nature of the modern Jewish experience. In her widely acclaimed The Origins of Totalitarianism, first published in 1951, Arendt offered a penetrating analysis of antisemitism and an interpretation of modern Jewish history that continue to be a source of public discussion and debate among Jewish historians and social scientists alike. The Origins of Totalitarianism, which established Arendt’s reputation as one of her generation’s most influential political theorists, contains the main themes of a Jewish historiography predicated upon a non-political view of Jewish history. The Jews of the Diaspora, Arendt claimed, never really had a political history, because they lacked a “world to win,” a field of action.1 Rather, Jewish experience in the Diaspora was shaped primarily (if not solely) by persecution and martyrdom. Arendt’s non-political conception of Jewish history was predicated, in large part, on the premise that all post-Emancipation European Jewish leaders were politically inept and self-serving assimilationists, incapable of sound political judgment when the interests and survival of the Jewish community were at stake. This allegation of Jewish political ineptitude and powerlessness was first developed by Arendt in three seminal articles published in Jewish Social Studies between 1942 and 1946.2 In The Origins of Totalitarianism, as Ismar Schorsch has noted, she * 1 2

“The Jewish Historiography of Hannah Arendt” was published in the Summer 1988 issue of Conservative Judaism. Reprinted by permission of the Rabbinical Assembly of America. Stephen J. Whitfield, Into the Dark: Hannah Arendt and Totalitarianism (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1980), 169. Hannah Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” Jewish Social Studies 6 (April 1944): 99–122; “Privileged Jews,” Jewish Social Studies 8 ( January 1946): 5–30; “From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today,” Jewish Social Studies 4 ( July 1942): 195–240.

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expanded her charge into a general “indictment” of all Jewish political sagacity: a two-thousand-year experience of powerlessness, and antisemitism, had “atrophied” the political capacity of the Jews.3 This is the underlying assumption upon which the Jewish historiography of Hannah Arendt is based. In this paper, I will discuss and analyze Arendt’s conception and interpretation of modern Jewish history and politics, as formulated in the first section of The Origins of Totalitarianism and in her early essays from the 1940s, on antisemitism, Zionism, and Jewish political culture.

“The Jewish Body Politic . . . Retired from the Public Scene of History” In her essay “From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today,” published in Jewish Social Studies in 1942, Arendt sought to analyze and explain the continuity of French antisemitism from Dreyfus to Petain. In so doing, she discusses and critiques the failure of French Jewry to understand the political significance of the antisemitic agitation during the Dreyfus Affair and hence to develop communal and political counterstrategies. This failure, as Arendt understood and conceptualized it, was a product of the Jewish people’s lack of a conscious political tradition, of their historic powerlessness to exert any measure of influence on the political forces shaping their destiny. Indeed, for Arendt, the key feature of Jewish history during the modern period was this sense of political powerlessness, or “worldliness”: “Jewish history,” wrote Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, offers the extraordinary spectacle of a people, unique in this respect, which began its history with a well-defined concept of history and an almost conscious resolution to achieve a well-circumscribed plan on earth and then, without giving up this concept, avoided all political action for two thousand years. The result was that the political history of the Jewish people became even more dependent upon unforeseen, accidental, factors than the history of other nations, so that the Jews stumbled from one role to the other and accepted responsibility for none.4

3 4

Ismar Schorsch, “On the History of the Political Judgment of the Jew,” Leo Baeck Memorial Lecture 20 (1976): 7. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973), 8.

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It is interesting to note, in this context, the significance of the Sabbatian movement of the seventeenth century in Arendt’s conception of Jewish history. Arendt, like Gershom Scholem, considered Sabbatianism to have been a great watershed in Jewish history between the medieval and modern periods. And yet, unlike Scholem, who evaluated Sabbatianism “as the central liberating event in modern Jewish history,” Arendt viewed Sabbatianism as a tragic event in Jewish history that initiated the fatal turn from the life of political action and concern. In Arendt’s view, the Sabbatian debacle, which had the potential to be “a great political movement” of “real political action,” led instead to a catastrophe “greater for the Jewish people than all other persecutions had been.” It marked a new and unprecedented level of Jewish powerlessness, and a conscious decision by the Jewish community leadership to estrange itself from the political arena. “From now on,” she posited, “the Jewish body politic was dead and the people retired from the public scene of history.”5 Central to understanding Arendt’s Jewish historiography is her thesis concerning the domination of the post-Emancipation Jewish community by a small clique of apolitical, self-serving, assimilationist Jewish notables. These nineteenth-century Jewish notables, whom Arendt described as parvenus, were the successors of the Court Jews of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, who had “financed state affairs and handled the financial transactions of their princes”6 throughout Western and Central Europe, eventually becoming the financial creditors of the emerging nation-states. The parvenu, for Arendt, was the Jewish equivalent of the bourgeois, a personality type to whom Arendt devoted a great deal of analytic discussion in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Like his gentile counterpart, the parvenu was incapable of thinking in political terms or making sound political judgments, and was allegedly interested only in his own social advancement and material well-being. The Jewish parvenu, lamented Arendt, “without knowledge of or interest in power, never thought of exercising more than mild pressure for minor purposes of self­defense.”7 By the nineteenth century, these Jewish notables, such as the Rothschilds and Gerson Bleichroder, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s banker and the first Prussian Jew to be ennobled without converting to Christianity, had significantly increased their social status and economic power through their direction of the financial transactions of the leading governments of Europe. The Jewish 5 6 7

Idem, “Jewish History, Revised,” The Jewish Frontier (March 1948): 38. Idem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 14. Ibid., 24.

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parvenus could, Arendt recognizes, play an occasional behind-the-scenes role in European public life through their financing of foreign wars. Thus, Bleichroder, often called the German Rothschild, helped Bismarck finance the PrussianAustrian War of 1866, after the latter had been refused the necessary credits by the Prussian Parliament. For the most part, however, she maintains, the Jewish parvenus lacked the wisdom or ambition necessary to translate their economic influence into “real” political power. The Rothschilds, Benjamin Disraeli, and Bleichroder, who embody Arendt’s self-serving and socially ambitious parvenutype of Jewish notable, are singled out for particular criticism and scorn. According to Arendt’s analysis, as presented in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the parvenu’s self-serving attitude also characterized his relationship to the Jewish community. The nineteenth-century Jewish notables “ruled the Jewish community, but they did not belong to them socially or geographically.”8 Modeling themselves on the gentile aristocracy, whose status and acceptance they sought, these Jewish parvenus willingly sacrificed solidarity with their own people in order to improve their social position. The parvenu, suggests Arendt, was the Jewish leader who was willing to deny the Jewish masses equal rights and opportunities in order to preserve and enhance his privileged position. As these parvenu notables became richer and more powerful, they “had a greater need for poverty of the Jewish masses as a protective argument. The poorer the masses became, the more secure the rich Jews felt and the brighter their glory shone.”9 While in her writings of the 1940s Hannah Arendt described these nineteenth-century Jewish notables as parvenus, in her later book, Eichmann in Jerusalem,10 she dropped the term but attributed the same characteristics to the plutocratic Jewish leadership of the Nazi era, whom she accused of complicity in the murder of European Jewry. The bitterness of the public debate over the book derived from Arendt’s scathing moral indictment of European Jewish leaders— particularly those who served on the Jewish Councils—during the Nazi era, whom she accused not only of cooperating with their enemies, but of actually enjoying the “enormous powers” granted to them by the Nazis. Her condemnation of Jewish complicity in Eichmann in Jerusalem, however, grew out of her earlier hostility to the “Jewish plutocracy” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she had felt obliged to unmask the 8 Ibid., 62–63. 9 Arendt, “Privileged Jews,” 9. 10 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1963).

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political ineptitude of those Jewish leaders whom she regarded as the antecedents of the Judenräte. So, as Sharon Muller has convincingly demonstrated, Arendt drew upon The Origins of Totalitarianism in her subsequent indictment of the “parvenus” who complied so readily with their Nazi conquerors.11 According to Arendt, the absence of political judgment and astuteness amongst European Jewish parvenu leadership during the post­Emancipation period had tragic consequences for the future of European Jewry. The lack of political foresight among the Jewish notables was directly linked, in Arendt’s view, with the rise of political antisemitism at the end of the nineteenth and during the twentieth century. In The Origins of Totalitarianism she argued convincingly that modern antisemitism was something new, basically unrelated to pre-nineteenth-century Jew-hatred. Modern antisemitism, she maintained, was a distinctly political antagonism that derived primarily from the short-sighted alliance forged by these Jewish leaders with the ruling authorities of the nationstate. Their refusal to renounce their traditional allegiance to the heads of state, or to seek alliances with other politically progressive (or revolutionary) groups in society, precipitated antisemitism: “. . . each class of society which came into a conflict with the state as such became anti-Semitic because the only social group which came to represent the state were the Jews.”12 Thus, according to the Arendt argument, Jewish notables themselves, through their political naiveté and misjudgments, helped breed the political antisemitism that culminated in the Dreyfus Affair and in the Holocaust. Their political ineptitude, moreover, resulted in their failure to recognize the seriousness of the threat posed by this new political antisemitism: “They therefore never knew how to evaluate antiSemitism, or rather never recognized the moment when social discrimination changed into a political argument.”13

Parvenus and Pariahs This incomprehension of the new force of political antisemitism was, for Arendt, most clearly demonstrated during the Dreyfus Affair in France. Emancipated French Jewry could not recognize, she claimed, that the Dreyfus case involved an organized attack on the political front. Hence, there was no organized 11 Sharon Muller, “The Origins of Eichmann in Jerusalem: Hannah Arendt’s Interpretation of Jewish History,” Jewish Social Studies 43 (Summer–Fall 1981): 237–254. 12 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 25. 13 Ibid.

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political activity on the part of French Jews to reverse the initial court decision against Dreyfus. One of the few outspoken Dreyfusards within the Jewish community was Bernard Lazare, the French-Jewish author and lawyer, whom Arendt singles out for praise as one of the politically courageous and astute figures in modern Jewish history. According to Arendt’s conception of modern Jewish history, Jewish society since Emancipation could be divided between pariahs and parvenus. These politically “conscious pariahs,” as she termed them—Lazare, Rosa Luxembourg, Rahel Varnhagen, Heinrich Heine, Franz Kafka, and Charlie Chaplin— are the real heroes of modern Jewish history, according to her interpretation thereof. Collectively, the live and legacies of these individuals, she maintained, comprised a “hidden” or counter-tradition in modern Jewish history that was infinitely preferable to that of the Court Jews and the Jewish millionaire bankers and philanthropists such as the Rothschilds, Cremieuxs, Montefiores, and Bleichroders. Bernard Lazare, in particular, occupies a position of singular greatness in Arendt’s account of modern Jewish history and Zionism. The first to translate the Jews’ status as a pariah people into terms of political significance, he made it a tool for political analysis and the basis for political action: Living in the France of the Dreyfus Affair, Lazare could appreciate firsthand the pariah quality of Jewish existence. But he knew where the solution lay: In contrast to his unemancipated brethren who accept their pariah status automatically and unconsciously, the emancipated Jew must awake to an awareness of his position, and conscious of it, become a rebel against it—the champion of an oppressed people. His fight for freedom is part and parcel of that which all the downtrodden of Europe must need wage to achieve national and social liberation.14

Lazare was one of the few outspoken Dreyfusards within the Jewish community; most French Jews resisted political involvement. “The Jews,” alleged Arendt, “including the very family of the accused Captain Dreyfus, shrank from starting a political fight. . . . The Jews failed to see that what was involved was an organized fight against them on a political front. They therefore resisted the cooperation of men who were prepared to meet the challenge on that basis”15 such as Emile Zola and Clemenceau. Throughout the Dreyfus Affair, she implies, the 14 Arendt, “The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition,” 108. 15 Idem, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 118.

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established Jewish leadership of France, who stayed so aloof from the political fray, did not even recognize that Clemenceau “was one of the true friends that modern Jewry has known.”16 Lazare had risked much to stand alone in support of Dreyfus; he repudiated Jewish, even Zionist, leadership who sought, as he put it, “to direct the Jewish masses as though they were children.”17 Throughout the Dreyfus Affair, concluded Arendt, Lazare saw “that what was necessary was to rouse the Jewish pariah to fight against the Jewish parvenu.”18 Alone among his countrymen, Lazare had urged a struggle within Jewish society itself, for rebellion against bigotry and antisemitism outside had to be matched with opposition to privileged Jewish leadership that claimed to defend minority rights, while resisting political involvement on behalf of Dreyfus. From Arendt’s perspective of Jewish history and public affairs, Lazare’s radical hostility toward to French Jewish leadership of his day was exemplary for its “moral clarity.” And yet, Arendt’s idealization of the constructive role played by the politically “conscious” pariah in modern Jewish history and culture is not supported by the empirical evidence. Most of her pariah heroes are conspicuous in their lack of Jewish identity and their lack of commitment to the Jewish people, and its political and social concerns. Both Rahel Varnhagen, about whom Arendt had written a book-length biography,19 and Heine had converted to Christianity and married non-Jews. Charlie Chaplin denied his Jewishness completely. And Rosa Luxembourg’s revolutionary socialism led her to reject unequivocally her Jewish tradition and ethnic particularism for the sake of “wider allocation” of social concerns. “Why do you come with your special Jewish sorrows?” Luxembourg had asked a correspondent in 1917. “I cannot find a special corner in my heart for the ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world.”20 Of all her pariah heroes, Lazare alone was genuinely committed to the Jewish people and their “political struggles.” Nonetheless, as critics of Arendt have noted, Lazare’s “message” was

16 Ibid. 17 Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 122. 18 Quoted in Ron H. Feldman, introductory essay to The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age, by Hannah Arendt, ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1978), 33. 19 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). 20 Quoted in Whitfield, Into the Dark, 172.

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never heeded. The Jewish masses, “for whom the words of the conscious pariah were supposed to have deep resonance,” did not rally to his cause.21

Arendt and Zionism The indictment of Jewish political judgment contained in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism informs her critique of Herzlian Zionism in particular. Her harshly critical analysis and interpretation of Herzlian Zionism, already formulated by the time Israel became a state in 1948, is especially noteworthy in light of her earlier identification and involvement, during the 1930s and early 1940s, with the Zionist movement. Arendt had started working for the German Zionist Organization as early as 1933, when she was engaged to research to collect documentary material on German antisemitism, in the Prussian State Library, for presentation at the Eighteenth Zionist Congress scheduled to meet in Prague during the summer of 1933.22 As one of her biographers has noted, “Arendt’s way of acting as a Jew,” during the 1930s, “was provided by the Zionists.”23 In Germany, she lectured before many Jewish audiences, particularly under the sponsorship of the B’nai B’rith lodges, on Zionism and Zionist history. After leaving Germany for Paris in 1934, a year after Hitler’s rise to power, she spent six years directing much of the work of the Youth Aliyah Office in Paris, helping Jewish children to escape to Palestine. With the fall of France to the Nazis, she was interned by the Vichy regime in the Gurs Concentration Camp, from which she was later released and, as one of 100 intellectuals, brought to the United States by the personal intervention of President Franklin Roosevelt.24 Upon her arrival in the United States, moreover, she was, for a while, involved with Zionist movement politics.25 Of the four references to Zionism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, two are favorable, one is unfavorable, and one is misleading.26 Arendt unequivocally praised the Jewish response to the Dreyfus Affair, which “gave birth to the Zionist movement—the only political answer Jews have ever found to anti-Semitism Muller, “The Origins of Eichmann in Jerusalem,” 252. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 105. Ibid. Salo W. Baron, “Personal Notes: Hannah Arendt (1906–1975),” Jewish Social Studies 38 (Spring 1976): 187. 25 Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, 169–179. 26 Whitfield, Into the Dark, 173.

21 22 23 24

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and the only ideology in which they have taken seriously a hostility that would place them in the center of world events.”27 Zionism marked the end of “the old Jewish indifference to political issues.” Arendt was, nonetheless, highly critical of the Herzlian approach to political Zionism. His political solution, she argued, was to “evade anti-Semitism” by fleeing to a Jewish homeland. Arendt contrasted the political Zionism of Herzl, which she condemned as “escapist,” with the political Zionism of Bernard Lazare, whose approach to the “Jewish problem” she both praised and shared: Herzl’s solution to the Jewish problem was, in the final analysis, escape or deliverance in a homeland. In the light of the Dreyfus Case the whole of the gentile world seemed to him hostile; there were only Jews and anti-Semites. . . . To Lazare, on the other hand, the territorial question was secondary—a mere outcome of the primary demand that “the Jews should be emancipated as a people and in the form of a nation.” What he sought was not an escape from anti-Semitism but a mobilization of the people against its foes.28

Lazare’s writings (his collected essays in English were edited for publication by Arendt during the 1940s29) inspired much of her critical assessment of Zionism, and its role in modern Jewish history. Lazare belonged to the official Zionist movement only briefly. He attended the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, but became estranged from Herzl’s nascent Zionist movement by 1899, feeling that it was acting like “a sort of autocratic government.” Lazare, like Arendt, wanted to promote a “revolution within Jewish life,” to criticize the role Jewish finance played in Jewish communal affairs and the effects it had on the relation of Jews and non­Jews. However, Arendt argues, there was no possibility for such radical views within “Herzl’s essentially reactionary movement.”30 Arendt’s criticisms of the Zionist movement, as they were articulated during the 1940s, were several. Zionism, she claimed, had never been an authentic “people’s movement.” She accused its leadership of having acted “as representatives ‘for’ rather than ‘of ’ the Jewish people.”31 Bernard Lazare’s critique of the role of Jewish finance in Zionist politics found expression in her own harsh 27 28 29 30 31

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 120. Idem, “From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today,” 237–238. Feldman, introductory essay to The Jew as Pariah, 32. Ibid., 31. Muller, “The Origins of Eichmann in Jerusalem,” 249.

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critique of “Zionist philanthropy,” which, she felt, “locked into place” the socioeconomic and class differences between the privileged wealthy Jewish leadership—for instance, those Jews who had been successful as “parvenus”—and the poorer Jewish masses. From Arendt’s perspective in the mid-1940s, moreover, the Zionist movement as it had evolved since the early part of the century could not provide the basis for the new Jewish politics that she had envisioned. “Zionism,”’ she claimed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “in the first decade after the First World War, and even in the decade preceding it, owed its . . . strength not so much to political insight . . . as it did to its critical analysis of psychological reactions and sociological facts. Its influence was mainly pedagogical. . . . It did not produce political convictions.”32 Arendt became steadfastly opposed to the Biltmore and Atlantic City Resolutions of the American Zionist movement, whose platforms, she argued, left the Arabs no choice but “voluntary immigration” or second-class citizenship. By the mid-1940s, Arendt finally broke with the official Zionist movement over the issue of Jewish-Arab relations in Palestine and what she felt to be the triumph of revisionism and the increasing bankruptcy of Zionist ideals.33 Thus, her article “Zionism Reconsidered,” published in the Menorah Journal in 1945, contained Arendt’s most scathing attack on Zionist politics, from revisionist party “extremism” through kibbutz socialism.34 In her unrelenting critique of the political judgment and nerve of the Zionist movement contained therein, as Ismar Schorsch has noted, Arendt finds the Zionist leadership “consistently guilty” of the same political obtuseness and timidity for which they condemned their opponents. She subsequently collaborated actively with Rabbi Judah L. Magnes’s lchud Party and Bri Shalom Movement, sharing his “dream” for Arab-Jewish cooperation in Palestine. Fearing that the claims of “national sovereignty” constituted a “dangerous event” for Jews and other minority peoples, however, she called repeatedly for a confederation of Jews and Palestinian Arabs, instead of Jewish statehood.35

32 33 34 35

Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 79, footnote 61. Muller, “The Origins of Eichmann in Jerusalem,” 249. Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” Menorah Journal 33 (October 1944): 162–196. Whitfield, Into the Dark, 175.

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Conclusion Hannah Arendt’s analysis and interpretation of modern Jewish history and politics can be evaluated critically on several counts. Ismar Schorsch has cogently challenged the fundamental premise of Jewish political ineptitude underlying Arendt’s non-political conception of modern Jewish history. As Schorsch has demonstrated, “studied politically, Jews have displayed over time an unusual ability to identify their collective interests, to assess the possibilities for action, to locate allies, to organize and deploy their resources, and to learn from their failures and mistakes.”36 In proof of his contention, Schorsch cites the changes in Jewish political strategy from the decision of the rabbinic leadership of the second and third centuries “to turn away from the politics of rebellion and adopt a strategy of political quietism,” through the “political realignment” of the Jews of Western Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with the forces of change and political liberalism, a significant political development that Arendt ignores. “In comparison with medieval Jewish history,” as Schorsch points out, “modern Jewish history exhibits political as well as religious diversity”37 that Arendt completely ignores. During the nineteenth century, notes Schorsch, the continued denial of Jewish emancipation in its varied forms “intensified Jewish opposition to those in power.” A prototypical example of this political style was the organized resistance manifested by the Parisian Assembly of Notables to Napoleon, which Arendt never once mentions or discusses. Similarly, as Schorsch correctly points out, when, during the early 1840s, Frederick William IV “unveiled the retrogressive idea” of reimposing a medieval corporate structure on Prussian Jewry, he was met not with political quiescence but rather with such “a barrage of petitions and protests from the Jewish community” that he soon withdrew his proposal.38 This event also is never mentioned by Arendt. Such instances of Jewish collective action and organized protest would seem to challenge Arendt’s unverified theory of an unbroken Jewish alliance with those in power in Western and Central European governments during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So would the general recognition, which can be substantiated by historical fact, that the struggle for Jewish emancipation “radicalized the political strategy” of much of the organized Jewish community, including its “parvenu” leadership, and that the “constant need to defend emancipation often 36 Schorsch, “On the History of the Political Judgment of the Jew,” 9. 37 Ibid., 12. 38 Ibid., 14.

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called forth bold and imaginative action” on behalf of collective Jewish interests and concerns.39 Thus, incredibly, there is no mention or discussion whatsoever in Arendt’s study the Alliance Israélite Universelle or of the German Centralverein, the two major self­defense organizations of Western European Jewry in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose work and creative leadership in defense of Jewish interests she completely ignores. Nor does she bother to mention or seek to analyze the astute diplomatic campaign waged by Western European Jewish leaders to “secure the freedom and equality of the Jews in the East,” through a system of minority treaties following World War I, with which serious Jewish scholarship available to Arendt had dealt.40 To do so would, of course, undermine the empirically unsubstantiated thesis she was trying to develop. Arendt’s analysis and interpretation of modern Jewish history, as contained in The Origins of Totalitarianism, has been the subject of further scholarly critique as well. As Sharon Muller has convincingly demonstrated, Arendt’s distinction between the pariah and parvenu, and her unfounded assertion that all Jewish leadership of the post-Emancipation period was the “historical embodiment” of her parvenu type, raise serious problems for the student of modern Jewish history. “Arendt’s portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish leaders as assimilationist parvenus who felt no concern for, or sense of brotherhood with, the Jewish masses, who sought to deny most Jews equal rights and opportunities in an attempt to enhance their own privileged status . . . flies in the face of the facts of Jewish social and religious development in the nineteenth century.”41 The fact is that many of the Jewish communal leaders who dominated Jewish public life in nineteenth-century Europe and England were not the self-serving and social climbing Court Jews and Jewish notables described by Arendt, lacking in political “consciousness” and judgment, and in Jewish communal loyalty and commitment. Rather, contrary to Arendt’s highly selective and eclectic reading of modern Jewish history, much the opposite is true. Absent from Arendt’s account of nineteenth-century Jewish history is any discussion of the public careers of many of those Jewish leaders who fought to promote and protect Jewish rights and interests at home and abroad, and who organized Jewish defense organizations to further this end. As a result, some of the most influential Jewish leaders and statesmen of the nineteenth century go 39 Ibid., 15. 40 Oscar Janowsky, The Jews and Minority Rights (1898–1919) (New York: Columbia University Press, 1933). 41 Muller, “The Origins of Eichmann in Jerusalem,” 251.

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unmentioned. There is no mention or discussion whatsoever of Sir Moses Montefiore, who certainly enjoyed one of the most extraordinary public careers of any nineteenth-century Jewish leader, one that was, moreover, predicated upon that type of political action on behalf of collective Jewish rights and interests that Arendt presumably admired. Although a Rothschild brother-in-law, Montefiore was the antithesis of Arendt’s self-serving and elitist parvenu. Montefiore was beloved by the Jewish “masses” of Europe to whose welfare and freedom he devoted his long public life. Although a product of Anglo-Jewry’s upper class— and hence, presumably, not worthy of mention by Arendt—Montefiore was, as Chaim Raphael has so aptly put it, “shtadlan for the Jews of the world.”42 Nor, surprisingly, is there any mention or analysis, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, of the public career and politics of Gabriel Riesser, who courageously led the fight for Jewish emancipation in nineteenth-century Germany. Riesser transformed the debate on the Jewish question in Germany by fearlessly challenging the attitudes of the government and persuading his fellow Jews, leaders and “masses” alike, that it was their right to demand civic equality from the German State. Neither Reisser nor Montefiore, to mention just two of several examples of Jewish leaders ignored by Arendt, held back from challenging their respective governments in order to protect or advance Jewish interests. Montefiore was also more than occasionally prepared to challenge the heads of state of foreign nations when Jewish life and liberty were at stake. Finally, Arendt devotes much analytic attention to the political career and social climbing of Benjamin Disraeli, who, she suggests, is representative of her parvenu type. While Disraeli was, of course, incessantly self­serving—“his chief interest in life was, indeed,” as Arendt so aptly puts it, “the career of Lord Beaconsfield”—he did not share the parvenu’s reticence to challenge his government on behalf of Jewish political rights or interest. On the contrary, as various biographers of Disraeli and historians of Anglo-Jewry have documented, Disraeli vigorously championed the cause of Jewish emancipation in Parliament, at substantial risk to his political career and future in the Tory Party. This subject, incredibly, is never touched upon in Arendt’s lengthy (and, I believe, ultimately misleading) discussion of Disraeli as a parvenu type. Finally, while Benjamin Disraeli’s personality, political career, and efforts on behalf of Jewish Emancipation have been both a provocative and enigmatic subject in Jewish

42 Chaim Raphael, “The Phenomenal Life of Sir Moses Montefiore,” Commentary 77 (April 1984): 51–54.

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historiography,43 Arendt’s skewed profile of Disraeli in her The Origins of Totalitarianism does not refer to, or show any familiarity with, what available Jewish historical scholarship and biography has had to say on the subject. In raising the fundamental issues of Jewish political sagacity, and the role of the Jewish people in the rise of antisemitism, it has been argued,44 Hannah Arendt made a significant contribution to contemporary Jewish historiography and political thought. And yet, as Sharon Muller has correctly pointed out, it would be wrong to view this contribution “as evidence of the veracity of her conclusions regarding Jewish history in the post-Emancipation period.”45 Hannah Arendt’s highly theoretical conception and interpretation of the modern Jewish experience, one can conclude, derived less from empirical historical research and examination than from a set of preconceived categories of behavior that she imposed on the material of modern Jewish history.” In the final analysis, Arendt’s theory of Jewish political ineptitude and powerlessness, upon which he overall conception of modern Jewish history is based, seems to be more an “ideological premise” than a historically proven fact.46

43 See, for example, Abraham Gilam, “Disraeli in Jewish Historiography,” Midstream 26 (March 1980): 24–29. 44 Sharon Muller, “The Pariah Syndrome,” Response 15 (Summer 1980): 56. 45 Ibid., 52. 46 lbid., 55.

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Hank Greenberg at 100: Remembering Baseball’s Greatest Jewish Superstar* When he died in 1986 at the age of seventy-five, Hank Greenberg was widely acknowledged to have been the greatest Jewish player in the history of baseball. His achievements were beyond merely great—they were monumental. He played in the major leagues from 1933 to 1947, but lost four and a half seasons to military service in World War II. And yet, as the baseball historian Robert W. Creamer has noted, “in that brief period he established himself as one of the best of all power hitters, possibly the best after Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig.”  In a major league career of only nine and a half years, Greenberg hit 331 home runs. He led the American League in home runs and runs batted in four times. He twice won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award, in 1935 and 1940. Greenberg captured the attention of sports fans throughout the nation in 1938, when he challenged Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record, finishing with fifty-eight home runs, two short of Ruth’s sixty. That same season Greenberg set a major league mark of his own by hitting two or more home runs in eleven games. In four different seasons, he had ninety-six or more extrabase hits, a record shared with Babe Ruth that no other player in the history of baseball has surpassed. He was baseball’s RBI king, and perhaps the greatest run producer in the annals of the game. He drove in 170 runs in 1935 and in 1937 a phenomenal 183, only one short of what is still the American League record, set by Lou Gehrig in 1931. From 1937 to 1940, Greenberg averaged 148 RBIs a year and 43 home runs. More than just the sum of his individual statistics, __________________________________________________________ *

“Hank Greenberg at 100: Remembering Baseball’s Greatest Jewish Superstar” was published originally as “The Original Hammering Hank—Greenberg at 100: The Greatest Slugger Time has Forgotten” in the November 1, 2010 issue of The Weekly Standard. Reprinted by permission of William Kristol.

15. Hank Greenberg at 100: Remembering Baseball’s Greatest Jewish Superstar

Greenberg led the Detroit Tigers to four American League pennants and two World Series titles over the course of his career. His fame was about more than just baseball. From 1933 through 1947, Hank Greenberg was America’s best-known Jew, a household name whose celebrity and renown eclipsed that of Albert Einstein, George Gershwin, and Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis. Amidst the growing antisemitism in the America of the 1930s, Greenberg refused to be intimidated by the hecklers taunting him at major league ballparks across the country, hurling epithets at the Detroit first baseman like “Jew bastard,” and “kike son of a bitch.” For American Jews during the 1930s, as Edward S. Shapiro put it, “Greenberg’s struggle against anti-Semitism was their struggle, and his victory over hatred and injustice was theirs also.” In 1956, he became the first Jewish player enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Today, as we approach the centenary of his birth, it is appropriate to remember the extraordinary life and legacy of Hank Greenberg, the greatest Jewish-American sports hero of all time.  The man known as the “Jewish Babe Ruth” was born in the Bronx on January 1, 1911, to Orthodox Jewish parents who had emigrated from Bucharest, Romania. His childhood dream was to play for the hometown team, in the famous Bronx ballpark “built” by his childhood hero Ruth—Yankee Stadium. And yet, when the Bronx Bombers offered him a contract in 1929, Greenberg turned it down. As a first baseman, he felt that he would never have a chance to replace Lou Gehrig, the Yankees’ great first baseman, and play on a regular basis. So, instead, he accepted an offer from the Tigers and after three years in the minor leagues began his major league career in Detroit in 1933. His impact was almost immediate. During the 1934 season, Greenberg hit .339 and drove in 139 RBIs while leading the Tigers to the pennant. But for the many Jewish baseball fans who regarded him as a role model, his most significant contribution may have been the decision that earned him an iconic niche in American Jewish history. In the heat of the pennant race, with the Tigers leading the Yankees by four games, Greenberg’s club was scheduled to play the Boston Red Sox on September 10, which was when Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, fell that year. Nine days later, on Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement and the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, the Tigers were to play the secondplace Yankees in what was sure to be one of the decisive games of the pennant race. Greenberg was torn about whether or not to play, even though he was not a religious Jew. Baseball fans and rabbis alike debated whether Greenberg should be in synagogue on the Jewish High Holy Days, or in the Tigers’ lineup. To the disappointment of some Jews, Greenberg succumbed to the pressure of the

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Tigers’ management, who demanded that Greenberg not abandon his teammates in the heat of the pennant race, and played on Rosh Hashanah. His two home runs beat the Red Sox 2–1. For Yom Kippur, however, Greenberg stood his ground, ignoring antisemitic comments from the Detroit press and Tigers fans alike, and chose not to play against the Yankees, spending the Day of Atonement at Detroit’s Shaarey Zedek synagogue. In his autobiography, Greenberg would recall the pride that he had felt when entering the synagogue that day. Much to his surprise, upon his arrival, the assembled congregants had paused in their prayer to give him a standing ovation. Indeed, Greenberg was widely applauded throughout the Jewish community for his decision, a choice that established a precedent for Jewish baseball players like Sandy Koufax and Shawn Green, who decades later followed Greenberg’s example and refused to play on Yom Kippur. In his absence, the Tigers lost to the Yankees 5–2.  Greenberg’s decision to affirm Jewish religious tradition was a defining moment for Jewish baseball fans throughout America, who came to revere him as a standard-bearer. His conviction, much admired throughout the baseball world, was immortalized in “Speaking of Greenberg,” the poem by Edgar Guest: Came Yom Kippur—holy fast day worldwide over to the Jew— And Hank Greenberg to his teaching and the old tradition true  Spent this day among his people and he didn’t come to play. Said Murphy to Mulrooney, “We shall lose the game today! We shall miss him on the infield and shall miss him at the bat, But he’s true to his religion—and I honor him for that!”

But Greenberg’s Jewishness was not universally honored. In the World Series that same year, the Tigers faced the St. Louis Cardinals, led by star pitcher Dizzy Dean, whose heckling of Greenberg (with antisemitic taunts like “Moses” and “kike”) was incessant throughout the seven games series, won by the Cardinals. Nor was that the end of it. In the 1935 World Series, Greenberg’s Chicago Cubs opponents were so vicious in their antisemitic invective that, as the New York Times sports columnist Ira Berkow wrote, the home plate umpire had to “go to the Cubs dugout, and warn some players that he’d throw them out of the game if they didn’t stop.”  Greenberg’s last year in baseball was Jackie Robinson’s rookie year, 1947. Playing with the Pittsburgh Pirates, Greenberg was one of the few opposing players to welcome and encourage Robinson. He later would say that Robinson had confronted much greater prejudice than he had: “You want to talk about

15. Hank Greenberg at 100: Remembering Baseball’s Greatest Jewish Superstar

real bigotry,” Greenberg would recall after his playing days were over, “that was what Jackie Robinson had to contend with in 1947. Teammates asking to be traded rather than play with him, opponents threatening to strike rather than play against him. . . . I never encountered anything like that.” In a game between the Dodgers and the Pirates early in the 1947 season, during which Robinson had ignored the racial insults that some of the Pirates players had yelled at him, Robinson and Greenberg, the Pirates’ first baseman, accidentally collided in a close play at first base. While they stood side by side, as Greenberg would later recount, he had encouraged Robinson, whom he “couldn’t help but admire,” saying to him: “Don’t let them get to you. You’re doing fine. Keep it up.” Birdie Tebbetts, a teammate of Greenberg’s for several years during the 1930s and 1940s, said that other than Jackie Robinson, Greenberg was the most abused player in baseball history. It was perhaps hardest on Greenberg in 1938, when he challenged Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record of sixty. Even with the approaching war in Europe on the horizon, baseball fans were riveted on Greenberg as he came closer to reaching Ruth’s magic number. Throughout the season, Greenberg understood that “being Jewish did carry with it a special responsibility. After all,” as he would recall in his autobiography, “I was representing a couple of million Jews among a hundred million gentiles, and I was always in the spotlight. . . . I felt a responsibility. I was there every day, and if I had a bad day, every son of a bitch was calling me names so that I had to make good. . . . It was 1938 and . . . as time went by, I came to feel that if I, as a Jew, hit a home run, I was hitting one against Hitler.”  In the two games following British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s much-publicized September 15 meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden, Greenberg hit three more home runs, raising his season total to fifty-three. Greenberg’s patriotic crusade was his personal response to antisemitism and the culture of appeasement that the slugger had come to detest.  There is little question that antisemitism played a part in Greenberg’s failure to break Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1938. Statistics show that Greenberg walked in at least twenty percent of his plate appearances in September 1938, suggesting that many of those were intentional passes to prevent him from breaking Ruth’s record. Over the years, sports writers and baseball fans alike have remained convinced that Greenberg’s pursuit of Ruth’s record was undermined by pitchers who refused to give Greenberg a decent pitch to hit. For the many antisemites in the stands, the press box, and between the foul lines, it was inconceivable, and unseemly, that a Jew should break the Babe’s record.

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The 1941 season was historic, with Joe DiMaggio hitting in 56 straight games and Ted Williams batting over .400, while Hank Greenberg went to war. The Tigers first baseman was coming off a banner 1940 campaign, having led the American League with 41 home runs and 150 RBIs, while batting .340, and was once again voted the American League MVP. He hoped to match or better those numbers in 1941, but only nineteen games into the new season, Greenberg’s baseball career was interrupted when he was drafted into the Army Air Corps, the first American League player to be drafted into the military in World War II. Although he missed most of the historic 1941 baseball season and found his salary cut from $55,000 a year to $21 a month, Greenberg was never bitter or resentful. Quite the contrary: as Greenberg told a reporter for Life magazine, “It wasn’t as much of a sacrifice as it appeared. . . . I never asked for a deferment. I made up my mind to go when I was called. My country comes first.” Three months later, Congress decided that men over twenty-eight years old were exempt from military service and, on December 5, 1941, Greenberg, age thirty, was honorably discharged. Two days later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, prompting Greenberg to reenlist, the first major league player to do so. Greenberg was widely admired for his patriotism, especially since at age thirty he was exempt from military service. North Carolina senator Joshua Bailey echoed the sentiments of baseball fans throughout the country when, in praising Greenberg’s military service, he remarked, “He’s a bigger hero than when he was knocking home runs.” Greenberg could have had a stateside job as an athletic instructor, but he volunteered for combat, serving in the China-Burma-India theater with the Twentieth Bomber command, the first B-29 bomber unit to go overseas. Now he would “fight the Nazis with a B-29 instead of his bat.” For American Jews, as for many baseball fans generally, Greenberg took on almost epic proportions. He served in the military for forty-five months, longer than any other major league player, missing almost four complete seasons, and half of another, before returning to the Detroit lineup on July 1, 1945. Never one to disappoint his fans—and the stands were filled to capacity that day to welcome him back—Greenberg hit a home run. Even more dramatically, he hit a ninth-inning grand slam to win the pennant on the last day of the season and finished his shortened seventy-eight-game season with a .311 batting average, before leading the Tigers to victory over the Cubs in the 1945 World Series.  In 1947, following a long salary dispute with the Tigers, Greenberg had planned to retire when the Tigers waivered his contract to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The owners of the Pirates, in a successful effort to persuade Greenberg to play

15. Hank Greenberg at 100: Remembering Baseball’s Greatest Jewish Superstar

one more season before retirement, offered him a salary of $100,000. Thus, in the last year of his playing career, Greenberg became the first player in baseball history to receive a $100,000 salary. Over the years, baseball analysts and fans alike have wondered what sort of statistics Greenberg might have compiled had he not sacrificed four and a half seasons, at the peak of his career, to serve his country. Had he matched his extraordinary accomplishments of the 1937–1940 seasons, when he averaged forty-three home runs a year, he would have concluded his career with well over 500 home runs and more than 1,800 RBIs. In so doing, he would have become only the fourth baseball player of the pre-1950s era to join the 500 home-run club, a sure ticket to baseball immortality, a measure of fame that Hank Greenberg, the “Jewish Babe Ruth” and one of the greatest power hitters in the history of the game, richly deserved.  Greenberg’s statistics are even more remarkable in that they were compiled in a playing career of only 1,394 games. Greenberg’s contribution to baseball, and his enduring legacy, however, cannot be measured in terms of statistics alone. Equally if not more significant is that Greenberg set an inspiring example for generations of American Jews through his work ethic, his respect for Jewish religious tradition, and his ability to transcend the religious prejudice and antisemitic taunts of opposing players in pursuit of baseball excellence. Hank Greenberg should be remembered above all as baseball’s greatest patriot. That the American League’s reigning home run leader and MVP in 1940 put service to his country above his love for baseball, sacrificing most of the historic 1941 baseball season to serve in the military, and then became the first major league player to enlist after Pearl Harbor, remains the most compelling part of his enduring legacy. In sacrificing much of his baseball career to serve his country, he displayed true heroism. What Donald Kagan said of Joe DiMaggio can just as easily be said of Hank Greenberg: “A baseball legend,” he was “also an American hero, . . . an American who quietly went to serve his country when called to war, . . . who represented the virtues and ideals of his era.”

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A Brief, Brilliant Career: Why We Can’t Forget Sandy Koufax* For five memorable seasons, Sandy Koufax dominated baseball as no other major league pitcher ever had before. From 1962 to 1966, Koufax led the National League in earned run average, the only pitcher ever to do so. At the same time, he compiled a record of 111–34, a winning percentage of .766, that has never been equaled. Koufax led the National League in wins, ERA, and strikeouts for three consecutive seasons. He pitched four no-hitters, including a perfect game. In 1963, he threw eleven shutouts, more than any other pitcher has since in one season. In 1965, he went 26–8 and set a major league record by striking out 382 batters in one season. In 1972, he was elected to Baseball’s Hall of Fame, becoming Cooperstown’s youngest member at the age of thirty-six. He remains today only the second Jewish player to enter the pantheon. Born in Brooklyn on December 30, 1935, Koufax attended Lafayette High School in Bensonhurst, where one of his friends was the television talk show host Larry King. At Lafayette, Koufax played on the basketball team, earning a reputation as one of the best players in Brooklyn. He didn’t play on the baseball team until his senior year, and then usually as a first baseman who would sometimes pitch in relief of another friend, Fred Wilpon, Lafayette’s pitching star and later the co-owner of the New York Mets.  Koufax won a basketball scholarship to the University of Cincinnati, where he planned to study architecture. In the spring of his freshman year, he became the overnight pitching sensation of the university’s baseball team, striking out thirty-four batters in his first two games and gaining the attention of ________________________________________________________________ *

“A Brief, Brilliant Career: Why We Can’t Forget Sandy Koufax” was published in the October 3, 2011 issue of The Weekly Standard. Reprinted by permission of William Kristol.

16. A Brief, Brilliant Career: Why We Can’t Forget Sandy Koufax

sportswriters and baseball scouts throughout the country. Before long, close to a dozen major league scouts, including the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Al Campanis, converged on Cincinnati and offered him contracts. Accepting the Dodgers’ offer of $20,000—a salary of $6,000 and a signing bonus of $14,000—Koufax left college after his freshman year for Ebbets Field. The Dodgers owners, as Koufax biographer Jane Leavy has noted, were overjoyed, regarding “the signing of a Jewish ballplayer the way others regarded the coming of the messiah. The Dodgers were so desperate for a Jewish presence, given the demographics of Brooklyn. . . . Koufax was a marketing godsend.” The team’s owner, Walter O’Malley, proclaimed him “the great Jewish hope” of the franchise, telling a reporter: “We hope he’ll be as great as Hank Greenberg.” At first, Koufax failed to meet such exalted expectations. His first few seasons were mediocre at best, a disappointment to management and fans alike. Koufax pitched in only twelve games in 1955, winning two and losing two. In 1956, his second season with the Dodgers, Koufax won two games and lost four. In 1957, his record was five and four. Ironically, it was only after the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles that Koufax began his remarkable ascent to superstardom. In August 1959, pitching against the San Francisco Giants, who had also recently moved west from New York, Koufax tied the major league record of eighteen strikeouts set by Bob Feller in 1938. With the 1962 season, his metamorphosis complete, Koufax began to make baseball history, pitching the first of his four no-hitters, striking out eighteen batters in a game for the second time in his career, and leading the major leagues with an ERA of 2.54. In 1963, the season in which he pitched his second nohitter, his statistics were monumental. He led the National League with twentyfive games won, a 1.88 ERA, and 306 strikeouts, winning the pitcher’s Triple Crown. He was the unanimous winner of the Cy Young Award, as the National League’s best pitcher, and was voted the National League’s Most Valuable Player as well. In the 1963 World Series against the New York Yankees, during which he won two games, Koufax set a new World Series record by striking out 15 batters in one game, and was voted the World Series MVP. For many baseball fans, Koufax’s meteoric rise symbolized the coming of age of baseball in the American West. A virtual unknown when the Dodgers moved to California in 1957, Koufax, by the time of his retirement in 1966, was a household name. He had become the greatest pitcher of his era, a baseball celebrity second only perhaps to Willie Mays.  In 1965, despite arthritis in his elbow, Koufax had what many consider the best season any pitcher ever had, leading the major leagues in victories, strike-

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outs, complete games, innings pitched, and ERA. Then on September 9, 1965, in a game against the Chicago Cubs, he pitched his fourth no-hitter and his first perfect game. Like Willie Mays’s over-the-shoulder catch during the 1954 World Series and Bobby Thomson’s home run “heard round the world” three years earlier, Koufax’s perfect game would become the moment for which he would be remembered. And yet, Koufax’s contribution to baseball that season cannot be measured by statistics alone. Less than a month after the perfect game, Koufax achieved, as Jane Leavy put it, “another kind of perfection by refusing to pitch the opening game of the World Series because it fell on the holiest day of the Jewish year,” Yom Kippur. By refusing to pitch, “Koufax defined himself as a man of principle who placed faith above craft.” Like Hank Greenberg’s similar decision thirty-one years earlier, this became a defining moment for a new generation of American Jews, and a source of inspiration for Jewish baseball fans. Bruce Lustig, the senior rabbi at the Washington Hebrew Congregation in Washington, DC, and a fan since childhood, has pointed to Koufax’s decision not to pitch “as a transforming event, providing the catalyst” for many Jews “to acknowledge and honor their religion.” Koufax’s action “both reinforced Jewish pride and enhanced the sense of belonging—a feat as prodigious as any he had accomplished on the baseball field.”  So, too, his successful joint salary holdout with his teammate Don Drysdale, in their 1966 preseason contract negotiations with the Dodgers, as several baseball historians have pointed out, was a “transforming event” that paved the way for Marvin Miller’s challenge to the reserve clause and the beginning of free agency. In hiring an attorney to bargain for them and in demanding contracts of more than $100,000 annually—a salary ceiling no player had ever exceeded—Koufax believed they were fighting for a basic principle: “That ballplayers aren’t slaves, that we have a right to negotiate.”  The Dodgers gave in to Koufax’s contract demands, and in 1966 he earned $135,000, the highest salary ever paid a baseball player. That was his last season, and he won twenty-seven games, with a phenomenal 1.73 ERA, and received his third unanimous Cy Young Award, despite the fact that the chronic arthritic condition in his pitching arm that had afflicted him through much of his pitching career had worsened. At the season’s end, in constant pain and warned by physicians that if he continued pitching he might lose the use of his left arm, Koufax shocked the baseball world with his announcement that he was retiring at the age of thirty.

16. A Brief, Brilliant Career: Why We Can’t Forget Sandy Koufax

Today, forty-five years after his retirement at the top of his career, Sandy Koufax should be remembered as the last of the greatest pitchers of baseball’s golden age. Now seventy-five, Koufax should also be admired for his refusal to pitch on Yom Kippur and his role in winning the right of a baseball player to negotiate over salary—achievements off the field that have done much to shape his enduring legacy.

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Index

Abington Township School District v. Schempp (1963), 183 Abrams, Elliott, 42 Acheson, Dean, 29, 60-61, 64 Adams, John, XIII, 4-5, 13-15, 17-18, 20-21 Adler, Cyrus, passim early years and education, 135 Adler as president of the Jewish Theological Seminary, 151-52, 156n58 Adler’s Non-Zionism, 136-39 Adler as representative of the American Jewish Committee at Paris Peace Conference of 1919, 157 Adler, Chaim Weizmann, and the Jewish Agency, 160-165 Adler and Louis Marshall, 55 Adler and the rescue of Jewish refugee scholars, 166-177 Adler and the Mesopotamian Plan, 140-141 Adler’s attitude toward Israel Zangwill, 159-60 I Have Considered the Days, 144 Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses, 154 Agudath Israel of America, 188 Ahad Ha-Am, 137, 148 Alexander, Theodore, 212 Alioto, Joseph, 212 Allegheny County, City of Pittsburgh, and Chabad v. ACLU (1989), 200 American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), X, XXIII, 206 American Jewish Committee, XV, 66, 70-72, 86, 97, 104, 106, 112, 120-21, 129, 134, 138, 146, 149-51, 155-58, 163, 165-66, 182, 187, 190n27, 197n44, 210, 220-21, 228, 233 American Jewish Congress, 149-50, 157-59, 182, 189, 199, 214, 220 Commission on Law and Social Action, 180 American Jewish Year Book, X, 166, 188 American Jewry and the Civil War (Bertram Korn), 190n28 American Jews and the Separationist Faith (David G. Dalin), 189n22, 190n27, 201n53

American Nazi Party, X, 204 Annenberg, Walter, 34 Aquinas, Thomas, 94 Arendt, Hannah, XXIII-XXIV, 168, 262-275 Arendt and Zionism, 267, 269-70 Eichmann in Jerusalem, 265 Origins of Totalitarianism, 262-64, 266, 269-271 Arkes, Hadley, 218-20 Army Air Corps, 282 Ausmus, Harry J., 252-53, 256 Bailey, Joshua, 282 Baker, Newton, 51 Bakke, Alan, 223 Balfour Declaration, 59, 136, 149, 155 Barth, Karl, 257 Bell, Daniel, 258 Belmont, August, XVII, 23 Benjamin, Judah, XVII-XVIII, 23, 46, 119 Bettelheim, Bruno, 168 Berger, Samuel, XIX, 38 Biden, Joseph R., 45 Bleichroder, Gerson, 264-65, 267 Blinken, Anthony, 45 Blum, Leon, 161 Bodleian Library at Oxford, 92 Brandeis, Louis D., passim Brandeis’s Jewish upbringing, 58 Brandeis’s appointment to the Supreme Court, 46-51 Brandeis and the American Zionist Movement, 59 Brandeis’s appointment of Jewish law clerks, 60-64 Brandenstein, H. U., 235 Breger, Marshall, 37 British Museum (London), 92, 94 Brown, Harold, 35 Brown, Edmund (Pat), 249 Bryan, William Jennings, 25, 98 Buber, Martin, 258 Buckley, Jr., William F., 255 Burkean conservatism, 260 Burke, Edmund, 260 Burnham, James, 255

Index

Burns, Arthur, 34 Bush, George W., 37, 39-42 Bush, Philip L., 248 Butler, Nicholas Murray, 173-74 Cardozo, Isaac N., 232 Cardozo, Benjamin, 56-57, 232 Carroll, Howard, 226 Celler, Emanuel, 125, 237 Central Conference of American Rabbis, 185, 199, 221n37 Chamberlain, Neville, 281 Chambers, Whittaker, 255, 260 Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire (1942), 216-18 Chertoff, Michael, 40 Chicago Museum of Science and Industry, 129 Children of the Ghetto (Israel Zangwill), 76 Christopher, George, 236, 239, 243 Church, State and Freedom (Leo Pfeffer), 181-82 civil liberties, 205-6, 214, 219, 222, 226, 228 Cleveland, Grover, XVIII, 24-25 Clinton, Bill, XIII, XVII, XIX-XX, 20, 22, 37-39, 41-45, 57, 196 Cohen, Benjamin V., 30 Cohen, David, 45 Cohen, Naomi W., 26-27, 71-72, 100, 104, 108, 146, 155, 195 Cohn, Gary, 45 Collin, Frank, 205-8, 211, 221, 229 Colman, Jessie, 239-40, 242 Commentary, 185, 255, 257-58 Committee of Jewish Delegations at 1919 Paris Peace Conference, 157 Cronin, Joseph, 243 cultural Zionism, 137, 148, 152 Dalin, David G. American Jews and the Separationist Faith, 190n27 Danforth, John, 196 Davidson, Israel, 148 Davis, Jefferson, XVII, 23, 121 Dawidowicz, Lucy S., 105, 126 Dean, Dizzy, 280 Decker, Bernard M., 210 De Funis, Marco, 223 Deinard, Ephraim, 70, 94 Detroit’s Shaarey Zedek synagogue, 280 Dicker, Herman, 95 DiMaggio, Joe, 282-83 Dinkelspiel, Frances (Mrs. Lloyd W.). See Dinkelspiel, Lloyd W.

Dinkelspiel, Lloyd W., 247-49 doctrine of a constitutionally protected right of privacy, 56 Dolson, Lee, 244 Dorsen, Norman, 221 Dreyfus Affair, 263, 266-69 Drew University, 255 Dropsie College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning, 134 Dropsie, Moses A., 67, 81 Dropsie College, 69, 134, 141, 163, 166, 170, 172, 176-77 Drysdale, Don, 286 DuBow, Eugene, 210, 228 Eastman, Max, 253, 255 Eichmann in Jerusalem. See Arendt, Hannah Einstein, Albert, 57, 67, 161, 167, 253, 279 Eisenhower administration, 30, 32 Eizenstat, Stuart E., 36 Elbogen, Ismar, 175-77 Emanuel, Rahm, 38, 42-43 Engel v. Vitale (1962), 183, 194-97 Ernst, Morris, 223 Esberg, Alfred, 246-48 Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, 183 Everson v. Board of Education of Ewing Township (1947), 181, 187 Friesel, Evyatar, 152, 164 Fackenheim, Emil, 258 Feigenbaum, B.J., 240, 242 Feinstein, Dianne, XX, 213-14, 225, 227 Feith, Douglas J., 40-41 Feldman, Myer, 32-33 Fillmore, Millard, XVII, 23, 46, 119 First Zionist Congress (1897), 135, 140-41, 144, 146-47, 151 Fisher, Alan, 206 Fishlow, David, 223 Fleishhacker, Herbert, 241-42 Ford, Gerald, XV, 34-35, 37, 97, 129 Fortas, Abe, 28, 57 Frankfurter, Felix, 28, 30, 32, 49-50, 53, 57, 60-64, 223 Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, 181-82, 201 freedom of speech, 215-17, 219, 222 Friedenwald, Harry, 138, 152 Friedenwald, Herbert, 138 Friedlaender, Israel, 148, 150, 152, 165 Friedman, David, 45

289

290

Index

Friedman, Murray, XXII, 79n1, 186, 190n27, 261 Friendly, Henry J., 64 From Marxism to Judaism (Herberg), 257 Fromm, Erich, 168 Future of the American Negro, The, (Booker T. Washington), 131 Garland, Merrick, 45 Garment, Leonard, 34 Gartner, Lloyd P., 74, 115-17, 119, 194 Gershwin, George, 57, 279 Gilbert, Arthur, 184-85 Gingrich, Newt, 196 Ginsburg, Ruth Bader, XIX, 57 Ginzberg, Louis, 77, 87, 89-90, 96, 148, 150 Glasser, Ira, 223 Glazer, Joseph, 199, 200n49 Glickman, Dan, 37 God, Caesar and the Constitution (Leo Pfeffer), 181 Golden Gate Democratic Club (San Francisco), 249 Goldberg, Arthur J., 31-32, 57, 201 Goldberger, David, 223 Goldman, Simcha, 192 Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), 191-93 Goldschmidt, Neil, 35 Goldstein, Sol, 208-210, 229-30 Goldwater, Barry, 196 Goodwin, Richard N., 33 Gottheil, Richard, 144, 173-74 Grant, Ulysses S., XIV, XVIII, 20, 23-25 Great Britain’s National Front, 207 Green, Shawn, 280 Greenberg, Hank, XXIV, 58, 278-83, 285-86 Greenspan, Alan, 34, 37 Guest, Edgar, 280 Guggenheim, Daniel, 84, 86, 105, 128, 138 Guggenheim, Simon, 86, 105, 128 Haas, Walter, 240-42, 249n67 Haines, Avril Danica, 45 Halberstamm, Solomon J., 92-93 Hamilton, Alexander, xiii, 5, 8, 10-12, 20-21 Hamlin, David, 221 Harrison, Benjamin, XIV, XVIII, 25, 140 Harvard Law Review, 62, 64 Hatch, Orrin, 196 Hatfield, Mark, 196 Haupt, Paul, 141-42 Hayes, Arthur Garfield, 223

Hebrew Union College, 89, 154-55, 167, 169, 185 Heine, Heinrich, 267-68 Heller, Ehrman, White, and McAuliffe (law firm in San Francisco), 248 Hellman, I.W., 248 Hellman, Jr., I.W., 241 Helms, Jesse, 196 Herberg, Will , X, XXIII-XXIV, 183-85, 188, 252-261 Herberg and Marxism, 253-54 Herberg’s religious thought, 258 From Marxism to Judaism Judaism and Modern Man, 255, 257-58 Protestant, Catholic, Jew, 252, 256, 259 Herberg and Church-State relations, 259 Herzl, Theodore, 135, 140-42, 144-47, 154, 159-60, 270 Heschel, Abraham Joshua, XXII, 186, 258 Heydenfeldt, Elkan, 232 Heydenfeldt, Solomon, 232 Higginson, Henry Lee, 52 Himmelfarb, Milton, XXII, 185-86, 261 Hirsch, Emil G., ix, 129-30 Hirsch, Maurice de, XVIII, 24 Holbrooke, Richard, 38, 43 Holmes, Jr., Oliver Wendell, 56, 60, 216 Holocaust survivors, 206-9, 212, 218, 226, 230 Hook, Sidney, 174, 253, 258 Hoover, Herbert, XVII, XX, 27, 56, 120, 12224, 130, 132 Howe, Irving, 258 House (of Representatives) Military Affairs Committee, 237 I Have Considered the Days. See Adler, Cyrus Imber, Naftali Herz, 69 incunabula, 70, 92, 94-95 International Columbian Exposition in Chicago (1892), 140 International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 254 Jacobs, Ruth, 213, 223 Jakobovitz, Immanuel, 195 Jackson, Robert, 217 Jastrow, Marcus, 147 Jefferson, Thomas, XIII, XVII, 2, 4-5, 16-21, 23, 135, 181 Jewish Agency (for Palestine), XVI, 136, 160-65 “Jewish Babe Ruth”, 279, 283

Index

Jewish critics of strict separationism, XXII, 183, 193 Jewish Defense League, 205, 209-210 Jewish political neutrality, XVI, 99-101, 104, 106, 111, 124-25 Jewish Publication Society, 66, 75, 77, 89-90, 134, 153, 166 Jewish Quarterly Review, 166 Jewish refugee scholars, XVI, 166-68, 170, 177 “Jewish Seat” on the Supreme Court, 57 Jewish Theological Seminary, XV, 66, 70, 76, 80, 82, 84-85, 87, 96-97, 129, 134, 141, 147-48, 151-52, 156n58, 166, 170, 177, 185, 189, 254 Jewish vote and the 1912 election, 109 The Jewish World, XVI, 105-6, 126 Johnson, Lyndon, XX, 20, 28, 31-33, 35, 57 Judgment at Nuremburg. See Stanley Kramer Kafka, Franz, 267 Kagan, Elena, 44, 57 Kahane, Meir, 209 Kahn, Florence Prag, XX, 238 Kahn, Julius, 237-39, 247 Kaplan, Mordecai, 148, 254, 258 Kendall, Willmoore, 255 Koshland, Daniel, 240 Kass, Leon, 42 Kaufman, Herbert, 244, 247 Kennedy, John F., XX, 31-33, 35, 39, 54, 57 King, Larry, 284 Kissinger, Henry, 33-34, 45 Klain, Ron, 45 Klutznick, Philip, 35-36 Koehl, Matt, 205 Koenig, Samuel, 233 Kohler, Max, 24, 70 Kohler, Kaufmann, 155 Kopp, Quentin, 212-13, 224-25, 227 Korn, Bertram W., 82 American Jewry and the Civil War, 190n28 Koufax, Sandy, XXIV, 280, 284-87 Kramer, Stanley Judgment at Nuremburg, 227 Kristol, Irving, XXII, 185-86, 261 Kristol, William, 37 Krochmal, Nachman, 76 Kunz v. New York (1951), 217 Kurland, Philip B., 216 Kurtzer, Daniel, XIX, 38, 41 Kushner, Jared, 44

Ladd, Jr., Everett Carl, 205 Lazare, Bernard, 267-68, 270 Lazarsfield, Paul, 168 Leavy, Jane, 285-86 Lectures, Selected Papers, Addresses. See Adler, Cyrus Leeser, Isaac, 67, 75, 78-81 Lefkowitz, Jay, 37 Lehman, Irving, 95, 122, 156 Lehman, Herbert, 122, 160 Levi, Edward H., 34-35 Levine, Rachel, 45 Lew, Jacob, 38, 44 Lewin, Kurt, 168 Lewin, Nathan, 192, 200 Lewisohn, Leonard, 82, 84, 86 Lewy, Julius, 171-75 Lipsky, Louis, 148, 158n64 Lodge, Henry Cabot, 49-50, 52-54, 236 Lovestone, Jay, 253 Lowell, A. Lawrence, 49-50, 52 Lowell Petition of protest against Brandeis’s nomination to the Supreme Court , 54 Lustig, Brian, 286 Luxembourg, Rosa, 267-68 Mack, Julian, 53, 62, 128, 152, 164, 176-77 Madison, James, XVII, 8, 16n75, 22-23 Magnes, Judah L., 112, 138, 152, 159n70, 165271 Magnus, Albertus, 94 Maimonides College, 69, 79-82, 85 McAdoo, William Gibbs, 47 Mann, Theodore, 228n50, 229-30 Margolin, Ephraim, 214 Maritain, Jacques, 257 Marks, Milton, 250 Marshall, Louis, passim Marshall and the Supreme Court, 114-22 Marshall, the Republican Party and the Jewish vote: the 1928 election, 122-24 Marty, Martin, 256 Marx, Alexander, 86-87, 92-96 Mayorkas, Alejandro, 45 Mays, Willie, 285-86 McClennen, Edward, 49, 51 McCollum v. Board of Education (1948), 182 McKinley, William, XVIII, 20, 25-26 Mendelsohn, Robert, 224-25 Mnuchin, Steven, 44

291

292

Index

Mesopotamian Plan (for the Jewish settlement and colonization of Mesopotamia), 140-41 Meyer, Frank, 255 Meyer, Michael A., 169, 172 Mikva, Abner, XIX, 38, 207 Miller, Marvin, 286 Miller, Stephen, 44 Modern Age, 255 Montefiore, Moses, 274 Montrose, Lawrence, 209-210, 226 Morais, Sabato, 67, 77, 83-8 Moral Man and Immoral Society. See Niebuhr, Reinhold Moreh Nebuchim (Maimonides), 94 Morgenstern, Julian, 167, 169-170-77 Morgenthau, Hans, 168 Morgenthau, Henry Sr., 51-52, 55, 102, 113, 155 Morgenthau, Henry Jr., XVIII-XIX, 27-29, 122 Moscone, George, 215, 227 Mosk, Stanley, 249 Mukasey, Michael, 40 Naked Public Square, The. See Neuhaus, Richard John Namier, Lewis, 162 Nash, George H., 256 National Conference of Catholic Bishops, 228 National Council of Young Israel, 189 National Jewish Commission on Law and Public Affairs (COLPA), 189 National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council (NJCRAC), 182, 228-30 National Jewish Welfare Board, 227 National Review, 184, 255-56, 260 National Socialist Party of America, 205 National Socialist White Workers Party, 205 Neier, Aryeh, 216, 220-23, 226 Neuhaus, Richard John, 201 The Naked Public Square, 201 Neuman, Abraham A., 144, 167 Niebuhr, Reinhold, 254-55, 257 Moral Man and Immoral Society, 254 Niles, David K., 29-30, 32 Nimrod, John, 225 Nixon, Richard, 33-34, 57, 222 Noah, Mordecai, 15, 17, 20, 22-23, 154 Nussbaum, Bernard, XIX, 38

Obama, Barack, XX, 42-45, 57 O’Connor, Sandra Day, 196, 225 O’Malley, Walter, 285 Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 31 Origins of Totalitarianism. See Arendt, Hannah Oster, Adolph, 94 Partisan Review, 258 parvenus and pariahs, 266 Pasha, Kiamil (Grand Vizier of Turkey), 141 Passfield White Paper, 161-62 Passos, John Dos, 253 Pennypacker, Sanuel W., 70 Peixotto, Benjamin Franklin, XVIII, 23-24 Petuchowski, Jakob J., XXII, 185 Peyser, Jefferson, 240, 242 Pfeffer, Leo, XXI-XXII, 180-183 Church, State and Freedom, 181 God, Caesar and the Constitution, 181 “Leo Pfeffer and the Separationist Faith” (David G. Dalin), 182n3, 191n29 Phelan, James D., 235 Philadelphia Group, 77, 79-80, 82-85, 87-88 Philipson, David, 124, 154-55 Pierce, Franklin, XVII, 23 Pierce v. Society of the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary (1925), 186 Prag, Mary Goldsmith, 246-48 President’s [Bush’s] Council on Bioethics, 42 Proskauer, Joseph, 78, 121-22, 173-74 Proxmire, William, 196 Raab, Earl, 214, 234 Rabb, Maxwell, 30 Reagan, Ronald, 20, 37, 40-42, 195, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, 185 Republican Party, XIV-XVI, XVIII, XX, 25, 66, 72, 97-99, 104-5, 107, 109, 113-14, 116, 118, 120-26, 145-46, 233-37, 240 Ribicoff, Abraham, 31-32 Riesman, David, 61 Riesser, Gabriel, 274 Robinson, Ira, 139, 167 Robinson, Jackie, 236, 243, 247, 280-81 Rockwell, George Lincoln, 204-5 Rolph, Jr., James G., 233, 239-42, 244, 249 Roosevelt, Franklin D., XVI-XVIII, XX-XXI, 28-30, 39, 51, 57-58, 61, 130, 139, 233, 236, 269 Roosevelt, Theodore, XIV, XVIII-XIX, 25-28, 35-36, 39, 54, 72, 103-4, 107-8, 118, 139, 174

Index

Rosenberg, Hans, 168 Rosenman, Samuel, 29-30 Rosenwald, Julius, IX, XIV-XV, 27, 53, 128-33 Rosenwald’s Southern School Building Program, 132 Rosenzweig, Franz, 258 Ross, Dennis, 43 Rossi, Angelo, 236, 240-44, 246-47, 249 Rostow, Walt W., 32 Rubin, Robert, 37 Russo-American Commercial Treaty of 1832 (Campaign to Abrogate), XV, 71, 107 Sachs, Paul J., 130-31 Safire, William, 34 Saltonstall, Leveret, 236 San Francisco San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 213 creating a religiously-balanced school board in San Francisco, 243-46 Jewish Appointees to San Francisco Board of Education, 1922–1964 (Table) Jewish Membership on Ten Major San Francisco Boards and Commissions (Table) San Francisco Civil Service Commission, 212 San Francisco Human Rights Commission, 224 Jews Holding Elective Office in San Francisco, 1911-1963 (Table) San Francisco Conference on Religion, Race and Social Concerns, 215, 227 San Francisco Examiner, 213 Golden Gate Democratic Club, 249 San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council ( JCRC), 215 Congregation B’nai Emunah, 212 Rudolf Hess bookstore in San Francisco, xxiii, 213, 225 Sunset Anti-Fascist Committee in San Francisco, 214 Sigmund Stern Grove Festival Committee, 242 Sarna, Jonathan D., 2-3, 9, 23, 55, 75-76, 90, 185, 187-88 Sayre, Wallace, 244, 247 Schechter, Solomon, 66, 76-78, 86-90, 94, 96, 134, 146-48, 152, 156n58, 158, 165 Studies in Judaism, 76

Schiff, Jacob, XIV-XV, 26-27, 54-55, 66, 7071, 73-74, 82, 84-87, 96-98, 100, 103-5, 107-9, 111, 113-14, 116-18, 128, 134, 138, 146, 151-52, 154-55, 156n58, 158, 164 Schneerson, Menachem (the Lubavitcher Rebbe), 194, 198-99 Schorsch, Ismar, 262, 271-72 Sears, Roebuck and Co., XV, 27, 128-29, 132 Seasongood, Murray, 234 Security and Exchange Act (1934), 30 Selective Service Act, 237 Semel, Rita, 227 separation of church and state, 183, 195, 199 Seventh Zionist Congress (1905), 153 Shapiro, Dan, 44 Shelley, John, 249 Sherer, Moses, 188 Sherman, Wendy, 45 Shulkin, David, 44 Shulman, Harry, 63-64 Siegel, Seymour, XXII, 126, 185-86, 189, 256, 261 Silva, Sandra, 212-13 Skokie, IL Skokie Central Traditional Congregation, 209 Skokie Holocaust Survivors Association, 209 B’nai B’rith Korczak Lodge in Skokie, 226 Proposed Nazi march in Skokie, 208 Sloss, Marcus, 241 Smithsonian National Museum, 139-40 Solis-Cohen, Solomon, 77, 79, 83-85, 87, 113 Sperber, Alexander, 170-71 Spock, Benjamin, 222 Sprayregen, Joel, 226 Stalin-Hitler Nonaggression Pact of 1939, 253 Stein, Herbert, 34 Steinberg, James, 43 Steinberg, Milton, 257 Steinhart, Jessie, 240-41 Steinhart, William, 241-42 Stern, Horace B., 160, 163 Stern, Mrs. Sigmund, 242 Stevenson, Adlai, XXI, 35, 236 Straus, Isidor, 28, 84, 86 Straus, Nathan, 59, 122, 128, 138, 164 Straus, Oscar S., XIV, XVIII-XIX, 22, 24-28, 36, 39, 54-55, 66, 70, 78, 100, 103, 108, 110-13, 119, 124, 134, 141-42, 144-46, 153-55

293

294

Index

Strauss, Leo, 168 Strauss, Lewis, 30-31 Stroock, Solomon M., 173-74, 176 Stuart, Edwin, 70 Studies in Judaism (Solomon Schechter), 76-77 Sulzberger, Cyrus, 138 Sulzberger, David, 138 Sulzberger, Mayer, IX, XIV-XV, 53, 66-97, 100, 103-4, 107, 116-19, 128, 134, 138, 141, 144-46, 153, 158-59 Summers, Lawrence, 37, 43 Sutro, Adolph, 232 Szold, Benjamin, 147 Szold, Henrietta, 59, 78 Taft, William Howard, XV, XVIII, 20, 25, 48, 52-53, 55, 66, 72-74, 101, 108-9, 113-19, 129 Tebbetts, Birdie, 281 Tillich, Paul, 257 Tinker v. Des Moines (1969), 225 Torshen, Jerome, 208 Tradition, 195 Troy, Tevi, 41-42 Trump, Donald, 44-45 Truman, Harry S., XVII, 27, 29-30, 32, 35, 37, 61 Tuskegee Institute, 131-32 United Synagogue of America, 149 University of Chicago, 42, 61, 129, 172, 174, 216 Untermeyer, Samuel, 98, 113, 117, 223 Up From Slavery. See Washington, Booker T. Vincent, Lee, 205 Voorsanger, Jacob, 238

Wallace v. Jaffree (1985), 196 Warburg, Felix, XIV, 66, 84, 86, 95, 105, 128, 134, 150, 162, 170-71, 175-76 Washington, Booker T., 131-32 The Future of the American Negro, 131 Up From Slavery, 131 Washington, George, XIII, 4-10, 14, 19-21, 26 Weinberg, Mathew, 215 Weizmann, Chaim, XVI, 59, 155, 158-63 Whiteman, Maxwell, 69-70, 77 Wickersham, George, 52-53 Will, George, 218-19 Williams, Ted, 282 Wilpon, Fred, 284 Wilson, Edmund, 253 Wilson, Woodrow, XVIII-XX, 25, 27-28, 4649, 51-56, 59, 102, 113-14, 118n88, 155 Wise, Isaac Mayer, 78, 194 Wise, Stephen S., 51, 55, 78, 113, 117n84, 122, 158-60, 165, 176, 223 Wolf, Simon, XIV, XVIII, 24 Wolfowitz, Paul, 40-41 Wollenberg, Albert C., 240, 242 Workers Age, 253 World Zionist Organization, 158, 161 Wosik, Joseph M., 208 Wurzberger, Walter, 201 Wyschogrod, Michael, 195 Yellin, Janet, 45 Zakheim, Dov, 40-41 Zangwill, Israel, 76, 102-3, 153-54, 159 Children of the Ghetto, 76 Zarchin, Michael, 247 Zionist Organization of America, 152, 160 Zorinsky, Edward, 196