Antisemitism Worldwide 2000/1

Henry L. Feingold^*

The title of this chapter is a play on the name of a popular book by Sinclair Lewis, published in 1935, It Can’t Happen Here. Lewis’s novel was a cautionary tale warning that fascism could come to America.¹ It was related to antisemitism only in the sense that many American Jews were convinced that fascism, a term they used generically, was about to reach America, bringing with it Europe’s virulent antisemitism. The fine distinction between fascism and Nazism escaped them. There might not be much antisemitism in Italy but there certainly was among their Italian, German and Irish neighbors.

This chapter will probe the American Jewish perception of the antisemitic threat of the 1930s and suggest that, while their fear was real, the threat was not. This overestimation of danger was not innocent datum because it fed into American Jewry’s response to what was happening to the Jews in Europe. In some measure it may account for the hesitancy of American Jewry in making its voice heard in Washington.

I came to this conclusion only after years of puzzlement about the results of the yearly survey US defense agencies undertake to monitor American antisemitism.² When Jews are asked to list various communal problems in order of importance, antisemitism inevitably ranks near the top, despite the fact that the intermarriage rate indicates that, far from being hated to death, they are in fact being loved to death.³ Moreover their high rate of professionalization, the high per-capita annual income, the disproportionate number of Jews who run for political office, hardly indicate that they are a group denied access to the American dream. Yet Jews perceive an antisemitic threat as if a pogrom were imminent. On the one hand, fifty years after the Holocaust one can hardly deny Jews their early warning system. However, misperception of a process such as antisemitism is a departure from reality, and in history, as in life, such untruths exact a price.

In order to highlight the reaction to it in the 1930s, we begin with a brief summary of antisemitism in the previous decade. Almost immediately we encounter a problem of definition. One historian of American Judaism, the late Ben Halpern, observed that antisemitism is “a highly confused and emotionally loaded term.”⁴ But for the less complex Jewish man in the street, identification is not a problem. It is like recognizing pornography: he can not quite define it but he knows it when he sees it. He is undeterred by the problem of targeting Jews in a pluralistic society or by the dilemma of punishing Jews for success in a society that worships success. Its fallout in America today seems comparatively inane and can include everything from the perennial argument over Christmas crèches in public places to the question of maintaining alternate side of the street parking in New York on Jewish holidays. In the interwar period it went from the rhetoric of antisemitic speakers to job discrimination and numerus clausus in universities; it encompassed terrible fear and hatred based on religion to housing restrictions in “better” neighborhoods or the nuanced distaste for Jews in the Protestant establishment. Moreover, antisemitism seems to possess its own internal rhythm: it flairs up and then subsides, only to reappear in a different guise in another time and place. This makes it difficult to determine that something new is happening. Clearly there was a new virulence in the antisemitism of the 1930s, yet there was also much that was familiar.

We begin with a brief description of three events perceived as antisemitic in the 1920s, keeping in mind that they occurred against a backdrop of antisemitic “noise” such as that made by the fall-out from the Messna blood libel (which occurred in New York State in September 1928) or the reorganized Ku Klux Klan which added Catholics and Jews to its hate list in 1922.⁵ The first is the series of restrictive immigration laws which began with the Emergency Immigration Law of 1921. Three years later the full formal Reed-Johnson Law was in place and in 1929 an addition was passed by Congress. The law featured a quota system which was determined by national origins. The object, ostensibly, was to recreate the ethnic mix which existed before 1890, that is, before immigrants from eastern and southern Europe inundated the country. Predictably the nations with the lowest quotas were those of eastern Europe, Russia, Poland, Lithuania, and those of southern Europe, especially Italy and Greece. Incidentally, or deliberately (see below), the restriction on immigration from eastern Europe particularly affected the massive Jewish exodus which had begun in 1870. The charge of antisemitism is based on this nebulous circumstance.

The second event was Ford’s publication and wide dissemination of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and other scurrilous antisemitic propaganda in his Dearborn Independent. Ford’s intent was not so much to deny Jews access but rather to feed the underlying wells of Judeophobia which served as the driving force of most antisemitic acts. It is less tangible than denial of employment but may in fact be part of the long-range rationale behind such antisemitic acts.

The third event concerns the case of enrollment limitations on Jewish applicants to Harvard University, considered America’s premier institution for the training of its leadership. The antisemitism of the 1920s is not limited to these examples and they are cited here only to establish a basis of comparison with the different reaction to antisemitism in the two subsequent decades.

In these three cases the problem consists of first identifying the antisemitic act and then measuring its impact. For example, when evidence that legislators were anxious to halt, in particular, the influx of Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe was presented at the congressional hearings for the immigration law act of 1924, it was pointed out that the object was to regain the ethnically plural composition that had existed in 1890. The laws nowhere directly singled out Jews. In fact, Italian Americans were convinced that they were the targets. When Gedalia Bublick, editor of an Orthodox Yiddish newspaper, complained at the congressional hearings that the law was antisemitic, he was politely informed that had he been a Jew born in Scotland he would have had no problem entering the country.⁶ Yet, if classifying the laws as clearly antisemitic is questionable, their relationship to the later European Jewish catastrophe is direct. Thousands of Jews might have survived World War II had these laws not been in force. They prevented Jewish refugees from finding haven where many already had family, and the genetic theory behind the quota, then called Nordic supremacy, was perceived as identical to the Aryan racial theory that motivated the Holocaust. But in the 1920s the easy acceptance that the problem lay in the Jewish germ plasm hardly aroused concern. Jews dismissed it as “nordomania.” It was only during the 1930s that the significance of that theory, now parading under the rubric “Aryanism,” became clear.⁷ For present purposes we should be aware that of all antisemitic laws with which the immigration laws may be compared, such as the 1881 Russian May Laws and the Nuremberg Laws, there can be little doubt that the American restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s had arguably the most baneful effect in all Jewish history. Yet the laws never directly referred to Jews.

The Ford case is problematic in a different way. Here the antisemitism was clear and outspoken. But Ford could not deny Jews access. He was a private citizen, using his enormous wealth and right of freedom of speech to poison the atmosphere against Jews. Interestingly for our later comparison to the Jewish reaction in the 1930s, Ford, who like Lindbergh accepted a medal from Hitler in 1939, was forced to curtail his activities and apologize in 1927, and in the Aaron Sapir libel case to pay compensation.⁸ The public relations strategy deployed by Louis Mar, president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), became the seed of the defense strategy later used by John Slawson, AJC executive director in the 1940s.⁹ More than any other, the Ford case illustrates that antisemitism could be fought and defeated, at least formally.

The Harvard limitations case is even more complex. Harvard was the most liberal of American universities and never directly adopted a numerus clausus policy which denied Jews access. Instead they simply restructured their admissions policy to include a broader geographic area thereby automatically assuring that fewer Jewish candidates would qualify for acceptance. Though it affected only a handful of Jewish students the outcry against what was perceived to be antisemitism was loud and clear. To allow such a limitations policy to remain in place would impact on formal education and certification which had become an important strategy for Jewish advancement. Yet in the ensuing debate it became clear that the number of Jews entering Harvard would remain higher than their proportion in the population. Moreover, anti-Jewish quotas were the rule in the nation’s medical and law schools while other less selective colleges welcomed Jewish students. In a word, Harvard’s new policy did not deprive Jewish applicants from finding places in other institutions, only in the best one.¹⁰ The burgeoning development of public school education and public universities would assure that total exclusion would not be the rule. Then, too, who was to say what Harvard’s admission policy should be? Though charged with a public mission, Harvard was a private institution and therefore had the democratic right to select whomever it pleased.

It is important to highlight here the fact that the Jewish reaction to the heightened antisemitism of the 1920s was to use all the defenses preferred by a democratic society, including the legal system, as well as their economic power and public relations, to fight what they viewed as a blight on a working democracy. That defense took many forms. Restriction at a desired country club sometimes led to the organization of a new unrestricted club. Strictures on housing led to the development of new Jewish neighborhoods, such as the Grand Concourse in the Bronx or the Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn.¹¹ In addition, Jewish job seekers were sometimes not averse to changing their names to American sounding ones, wearing a crucifix or a religious medal, or obtaining a letter from a willing minister to attest to the fact that they were Christian. In 1940 the Jewish population of Los Angeles constituted about 6 percent, but 46 percent of the registered name changes were made by Jews.¹² After World War II the plague of name changes was buttressed by the popularity of a “nose job,” to fit the perceived Christian sense of facial aesthetics. Sometimes if a Jewish candidate did not get into medical school he would train to become a dentist. Among such Jews the initials DDS, doctor of dental surgery, came to stand for “disappointed doctor or surgeon.” Ways were often found to get around the intended denial of access.

There was considerable concern about the effect on group and individual self-esteem wrought by antisemitism. Beginning in the late 1920s and for much of the 1930s the organizations for Jewish social workers, which had become a popular vocational choice especially for Jewish women, discussed the need to change the Jewish occupational profile, which was heavily weighted against jobs involving farming and physical labor and toward white collar management categories. Many of these social workers, influenced undoubtedly by Marxian preference for the “proletariat,” were convinced that antisemitism would vanish once Jews had a “normal” class configuration.¹³ In other cases Jewish parents worried that the internalization of antisemitism would lead to self-hatred in their children.¹⁴ Public lectures by Kurt Lewin, the noted refugee psychotherapist, on how to protect the delicate psyches of Jewish children were popular.

The children of Jewish immigrants, however, were more concerned about the threat antisemitism posed to their aspirations than to their souls. They sought to circumvent its strictures in every way possible, while remaining optimistic about America. “The candle of intolerance,” observed one journalist in 1926, “is spluttering in its socket, about to breathe its last gasp.”¹⁵ And the basic condition of their lives bore this out. Jews benefited fully from the fruits of the “prosperity decade,” making advances in their occupational status, raising their educational level and yearly per capita income. Religious congregations went deeply into debt in order to build new, often sumptuous, synagogues. They successfully fought the Sunday closing laws in the courts. The nativist and antisemitic forces seemed to be in full retreat towards the end of the decade. In 1927 Ford, fearing a court suit in which he would have to testify and facing a Jewish boycott of his Model T, offered an apology for his antisemitic diatribes.¹⁶ In 1934 the Ku Klux Klan which boasted four million members in 1924, declared itself bankrupt, its membership down to a few thousand. Related nativist organizations such as the National Civic Federation and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) also encountered problems in balancing their books and cut back on activity. The raucous nativist sentiment that led to the Reed-Johnson Immigration Law was barely audible by the end of the decade. Politically, too, Jews became more acceptable. The first “Jew deal,” the use of Jewish professional legal and administrative talent at the highest echelons of government, was started by Al Smith, when he was governor of New York State between 1923 and 1928. It was Smith’s example that served as Roosevelt’s model when he appointed many Jews to top advisory posts in his administration, including Judge Samuel Rosenman, his principal advisor and speech writer.

Thus, despite heightened antisemitism during the 1920s, unlike the 1930s, it did not frighten the children of immigrants or put a crimp in their extraordinary rise in economic status. The story is quite different in the 1930s and the reason can be found in the contrasting history of these two tandem decades. What had changed in the 1930s to account for the difference in the American Jewish reaction? So fearful were the American Jews of the 1930s that Fortune magazine, then one of the most influential of the nation’s journals, published an article which began with the observation that “the apprehensiveness of American Jews has become one of the important influences in the social life of our time.” The article went on to show that, contrary to antisemitic rhetoric, Jews dominated no part of the American economy except the junk business, film, and some parts of the clothing industry. But it also warned Jews to abandon their “provocative... defense measures.”¹⁷ By 1938 the Anglo-Jewish press was full of dire warnings, often altering the aforementioned Sinclair Lewis title to “It Can Happen Here!” Believing that Jews called too much attention to themselves, Cyrus Adler, then chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, counseled “controlled silence.” He was not alone in urging ‘circumspect” public behavior while calling for Jews to “disassociate” themselves from “foreign groups,” lest they put Jewish loyalty in doubt.¹⁸ Particularly distressing for established “uptown” Jews associated with the AJC, was the activity of Jewish radicals and labor leaders. The Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a more radical form of industrial unionism compared to the American Federation of Labor, was portrayed by the antisemitic press as a Jewish conspiracy, and indeed a disproportionate number of its field organizers were Jews. Jewish political radicalism caused endless distress which dated from the Palmer raids of 1919, when radicals, including a large number of Jews, among them “Red” Emma Goldmann, were rounded up and shipped to the Soviet Union. It was at this historical juncture that the charge linking Judaism and bolshevism became a mainstay of the antisemitic im. During the 1930s the allegation of “Judeo-bolshevism,” now backed by Goebbels’ propaganda machine, became more pronounced. The AJC’s publication of the findings of its research division showing that Jews formed only a small portion of the Soviet leadership availed little.¹⁹ For Jews the old adage that “Bronstein and Martov make the revolution, Levy and Cohen pay the price,” seemed all too true.

The linkage between Jews and communism in the public mind came to a head in the famous Scottsboro case (1932–35) in which nine young black men were falsely accused of raping two white women. The case was seized upon by the Communist Party to demonstrate the party’s concern for civil rights and to fashion an alliance between the American worker and the black underclass. A flamboyant Jewish lawyer, Samuel Leibowitz, was retained to defend the “Scottsboro boys” while the Party promoted their case to the public. The guilty verdict went to the Supreme Court for review and the absence of blacks on the jury was enough to win a judgment for a new trial. But as a matter of pride the Alabama jury continued to find the defendants guilty and with each new trial the antisemitic fall-out grew more pronounced. For Jews in the South the linkage as defenders of the detested blacks was considered dangerous. Many remembered the fate of Leo Frank who was lynched in 1915. The following doggerel, representing an imaginary battle cry by Roosevelt to his wife, was widely circulated during the presidential campaign of 1936:

You kiss the niggers,

I’ll kiss the Jews.

We’ll stay in the Whitehouse

As long as we choose.²⁰

Employment discrimination based on antisemitism sharpened during the 1930s. Newspaper ads openly stated that “no Jews need apply.” Sometimes there were comical twists. The New York telephone company insisted that it could not hire Jewish women as operators because their arms were too short to reach the switchboards. An ad in Variety, the show business newspaper, advertised for ushers with blond hair and straight noses. Employment discrimination was not unknown in the 1920s but its impact was balanced by the remarkable development of the Jewish ethnic economy, especially in small business, such as jewelry and tobacco stores and second-hand goods. Some of the unemployed could be absorbed by Jewish enterprise. But in the 1930s the depression hit first at these small, usually undercapitalized, businesses whose owners themselves had to join the unemployed. The introduction of the merit system for teaching and other civil service jobs offered more employment for Jews who had attained formal education and certification. But it often intensified antisemitism especially among the American Irish who considered the municipal and state civil service as a kind of monopoly. An official Diocese newspaper, The Brooklyn Tablet, complained that “in the professions, civil service, schools and public life they [Jews] are represented out of all proportion to their numbers.” In a 1938 public opinion survey over 25 percent agreed that Jews had too many government jobs.²¹ Unemployment in the Jewish community rose so steeply that Jewish communal philanthropy could not cope with it. In 1934 the Jewish jobless were transferred to the federal relief roles. The promise made to Dutch colonial governor Peter Stuyvesant that the Jews would always take care of their own which was sustained with such ethnic pride since 1654, had been broken.

But it was more than simply vitriolic hate rhetoric that Jews heard in the 1930s. The number of professional antisemitic organizations increased from about five to over one hundred. They were led by popular radio speakers such as Charles Coughlin, whose Christian Front goon squads caused havoc in Jewish neighborhoods, sometimes with the cooperation of the local police.²² In their violence and proto-military affectations they bore a similarity to Nazi storm troopers. This was especially true of William Dudley Pelley’s Silver Shirts and of Fritz Kuhn the “Führer” of the German American Bund, whose rallies could have been mistaken for a scene directly out of a Nuremberg Partei Tag.²³ In the last mentioned case particularly noteworthy was the Madison Square Garden mass rally of 20 February 1939, which featured participants waving thousands of Nazi flags and a giant banner, saying: “Wake up America! Smash Jewish communism!” Yet these collective antisemitic voices were not as resonant as that of Ford’s Dearborn Independent during the 1920s. Jews were simply listening more intently and perhaps hearing more.

More disturbing was the antisemitism that made its debut in the political arena during the 1930s. The complaint that Jews had too much money and power was familiar. The difference during the depression decade was that the “Jewish question,” dealing with how much money and power Jews should be allowed to have, might be placed on the American political agenda as it had in Germany, Poland and other European nations. Except for Federal Order #11 which banned the Jews from the Eastern Mississippi department in 1862 there had been few other examples in American history of the amplification of antisemitism through the political power of the state.

As in prior decades, candidates for office would occasionally employ antisemitic remarks to gain an edge. The presidential election campaign of 1936 witnessed an unusual amount of personal slander of Roosevelt for appointing too many Jews and for himself perhaps being a Jew in disguise. In the antisemitic imagination the welfare state was viewed as a form of “Jewish socialism.” The term “Jew deal,” which became common political currency, referred to people such as Henry Morgenthau, Felix Frankfurter, Samuel Rosenman, Benjamin Cohen, Isador Lubin and others prominent Jews in the judiciary and the highest echelons of the federal civil service, some of whom were members of Roosevelt’s inner circle.²⁴ This imputation became so prevalent that when in 1938 Roosevelt proposed naming Felix Frankfurter to the Supreme Court to replace Benjamin Cardozo, some influential Jews became anxious. A.H. Sulzberger, editor of the New York Times led a group of leading Jews who urged Roosevelt not to make the appointment because “the present virulence of antisemitism is undefinable, its future unpredictable.”²⁵ The owners of the New York Times had previously urged writers with Jewish surnames to identify themselves only by initials. Throughout the 1930s and the 1940s “Jewish” stories were consistently underplayed to avoid any suspicion that the paper favored Jews. Such apprehensiveness was not uncommon especially among Jews of high station who had much to lose and little to fall back on.²⁶

The most likely area where normative antisemitism might overnight be converted into the dreaded political brand was in foreign policy. The threat should be viewed from two vantage points. The first concerns antisemitism affecting the makers of policy and the second, antisemitism within the policy itself, especially as it related to the problem of Jewish refugees. Though more Jews were employed in the federal civil service than ever before it was common knowledge that certain areas remained off-limits for Jews. The State Department was one of these and few Jews therefore applied for its foreign service. There is ample evidence in the diaries of Breckinridge Long, assistant secretary of the Special Problems Division and the key official responsible for the admission of Jewish refugees, of an abiding distaste for “New York Jews.”²⁷ He was not alone among State Department officials in holding such sentiments. There were also occasional incidents of antisemitism among consular officials who by a peculiar twist in the immigration law had the final say on who received the, ultimately, life-saving visas. It was not a name-calling brand of antisemitism and therefore difficult to identify. Researchers differ in their judgment about whether antisemitism was a major factor in determining policy involving the rescue of Jewish refugees.²⁸ The treatment of the refugees, which might have served as a litmus test of official antisemitism, was never a majorforeign policy issue during the 1930s.

Still, had the American people been asked whether they favored admission of refugees, the response according to the available surveys, would have been overwhelmingly negative. The State Department was carrying out the wishes of the American Congress and beyond that of the American people. It was a case of democracy at work. The issue that revealed the deepest chasm between the Jews and the devoutly Catholic Irish Americans who dominated the powerful Church, was the Spanish Civil War, which had a much greater antisemitic fall-out than the question of the admission of Jewish refugees. Catholics saw Franco as a crusader against “Godless communism.” The disproportionate number of Jewish volunteers for the Lincoln Brigade, the American contingent of the International Brigade, was all the evidence they needed to prove the linkage between Jews and communism. Indeed, one anti-communist Jewish journalist pictured the brigade as the largest Jewish army since Bar Kochba. For Franco supporters the Jewish activity was evidence that Jews were hopelessly radical in politics and had not changed their ways since their support of persecution of the Mexican clergy during the regime of Plutarco Calles in 1921. The deep division between the two ethnic groups of the New Deal remained to plague the rescue effort during the war. When the Catholic prelates were approached for support for the refugees, some of whom were newly baptized Catholics, many proved to be indifferent.²⁹

It was the direction of foreign policy, rather than domestic questions of Jewish power, which became the likeliest instrument to bring the Jewish question onto the political agenda. The issue was joined during the “great debate” over intervention in the European war which predictably American Jewry favored. Jewish support of intervention put it in direct conflict with the America First Committee which carried the flag of isolationism. Until late 1940 the isolationists in Congress carried the day. The neutrality laws which succeeded the embargo on the sale of arms called for “cash and carry” which virtually sealed the fate of loyalist Spain. Popular support of the isolationist position persisted after Berlin broke the Munich agreement by occupying the rump of Czechoslovakia in March 1939.³⁰ Revisionist historian Harry Elmer Barnes responded to Nazi brutality against Jews by stating that it was minor compared to the dire consequences of the British blockade of Germany between 1917 and 1918.³¹

But with the outbreak of war in September the tide turned against isolationism. Paradoxically, it was precisely at this juncture that the antisemitic elements within the legitimate isolationist movement nearly prevailed. This possibility was very likely to occur in 1940 and helps explain the inordinate fear of American Jewry, which was related to what was happening in Germany to German Jewry.

The last throes of isolationism, which now clearly showed its antisemitic roots, occurred in September 1941 in Des Moines, Iowa, when Charles Lindbergh, still the most popular figure in America, warned that Jews and Anglophiles were trying to bring the nation into war and would pay a price for it. But the Des Moines speech marked the end of Lindbergh’s reign as an American hero and of any influence he might have projected on public policy. The press almost uniformly condemned the speech and Roosevelt viewed him as a fool and a traitor. The exact turning point was the Argentia conference of August 1941 in which the Atlantic Charter with its principles ringing the four freedoms was adopted. The aims of the war, embodied in the charter, played a similar role to Wilson’s fourteen points. The ideological basis of America’s eventual entry into the war resonate with principles, including freedom of religion, held dear by American Jewry and mark it off as a great victory. Unfortunately, Jewry still did not feel more secure since the news from Europe about the fate of their brethren was too bitter and in 1941 Hitler’s armies still seemed invincible.

Their domestic situation was uncertain enough but it does not present sufficient cause for the Jewish reaction to it, especially when we consider that in both the economic and political sphere antisemitism was clearly a failure. Systemic employment discrimination could not prevent American Jewry from emerging from the Depression faster than other ethnic groups. The climb of American Jewry to becoming the most highly professionalized, wealthiest ethnic group in America began during the war. Despite the antisemitic cry that Jews had too much power, Roosevelt continued to use Jewish talent freely in his administration. Jewish appointments to posts within the upper echelons of the federal civil service and in the courts, as well as to his inner circle, compared favorably with those of other heretofore neglected ethnics. The newly empowered ethnic bloc was, after all, the essence of the New Deal. The possibility of a Jewish question appearing on the American political agenda, as it did in Germany and other European countries, was minimal in America. America’s political structure, its heterogeneity, made it more resistant to political antisemitism which elsewhere posed the real threat to Jewish well-being.

Father Charles Coughlin, Gerald L.K. Smith, Joseph E. McWilliams, Fritz Kuhn, Gerald Winrod and others who captured public attention with their antisemitic message did not in the end fare well. Nor did the dozens of newly established antisemitic organizations. The latest research concludes that the demagogues that plagued the Roosevelt administration never posed a real threat of finding a place in the mainstream of American politics. Moreover the two most popular ones, Huey Long, with his “share the wealth” program, and Upton Sinclair, with his “end poverty in California” campaign, eschewed antisemitism.³² Coughlin’s demagoguery was finally challenged by more liberal voices in the Catholic hierarchy such as Cardinal Mundelein of Chicago; his fell silent altogether after Pearl Harbor. Fritz Kuhn, the German American Bund “führer,” was indicted and imprisoned in 1940 as a result of the efforts of Rep. Samuel Dickstein, who represented an almost all Jewish district on New York’s Lower East Side and was for a time chairman of the House Immigration and Naturalization Committee. As the war drew nearer, American public opinion gradually became aware that the threat Nazi Germany posed to the national interest outweighed other factors. American reaction to Kristallnacht on 9 November 1938 was so negative that Hans Dieckhoff, the German ambassador, complained that years of painstaking effort to build antisemitic opinion in America had been destroyed in a single night.³³ Though Hitler’s legions had swiftly cut through France and the Low Countries, German casualties on the Russian front were unexpectedly high. More importantly, after America entered the war in December 1941 the antisemitic thrust was parried. The enemy the U.S. was fighting was after all a racist regime that had the murder of Jews as its ideological core.

By 1941, as if to prepare itself for the approaching war, American public opinion had begun to swing away from the most extreme forms of isolationism, although the isolationist impulse did not vanish totally with Pearl Harbor: it became the “Asia first” strategy pushed by General MacArthur. But Roosevelt, to the chagrin of Hitler’s high command, opted for a “Germany first” strategy. It was a decision made without the Jews specifically in mind but it went far toward hastening victory. Nor did the accompanying antisemitism totally disappear. According to available public opinion surveys antisemitism actually reached its zenith three years later, in 1944, and only declined sharply thereafter.³⁴ That paradoxical juxtaposition might account for the confusion of Jewish recruits who encountered antisemitism in the armed forces. Americans were most antisemitic precisely at the juncture when they were expending their wealth and blood in a bitter fight against Nazi Germany, which was totally committed to destroying Jewry. As in most Western a degree of antisemitism was the normative condition. It was more an expression of an animus embedded in the culture than it was ideological. Physical confrontations occurred but they were the exception. There are few instances when antisemitism affected public policy or denied Jews access. During the 1930s American negative attitudes toward its Jews became more pronounced but political antisemitism itself remained latent.

As mentioned, antisemitism did not interfere with upward Jewish mobility. Jews did comparatively well in the 1920s and 1930s. In the realm of politics one could actually conclude that Jewish influence and leverage was heightened during the 1930s. Although there were undoubtedly some antisemites involved in decision making, clearly the Roosevelt administration was less antisemitic than the general American public, certainly less than the 76th Congress that killed the 1939 Wagner-Rogers Bill to admit Jewish refugee children outside the quotas. Merely a year later a veritable craze developed to admit non-Jewish British children, victims of the “Blitz.” It is possible to conclude that during the 1930s, as today, Jews perceived a greater threat from antisemitism than there actually was.

We have noted that by the 1930s Jewish defense agencies had learned how to use the courts and were on their way to deploying a public relations and public education strategy to promote tolerance and pluralism. Though Marshall died in 1929, the strategy he used to stop Henry Ford must still have been fresh in the minds of Jewish leadership. The AJC, under the direction of John Slawson, did in fact initiate a similar approach based on “education” in 1943, when it sponsored “action research” to study and suggest strategies to fight antisemitism. Max Hokheimer, a researcher associated with the Frankfurt school, became head of the AJC’s research department and brought colleagues such as Theodor Adorno with him. A massive five-volume study of antisemitism was planned.³⁵ The wide publicity given to the four chaplains, one of whom was a rabbi, who went down with the sinking of the troop ship Dorchester in February 1943, did much to show the nation that Jews too were doing their part for the war effort. The customary antisemitic charges that Jews were malingering and profiting from the war were challenged. This “campaign” stands in sharp contrast to the silence counseled by Jewish leaders during the 1930s lest more antisemitic furor be aroused. But while Slawson’s activist strategy ultimately had an enormous impact on the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and 1960s, the efforts to “combat the disease of hate” came too late to counter the apprehensiveness of Jews during the 1930s. The realization that tolerance and pluralism could be marketed, just as Goebbels marketed antisemitism, accounts in some measure for the growing acceptance of Jews after World War II.³⁶

The impact of antisemitism on refugee policy needs to be considered to balance the picture. This was not antisemitism of the nation’s top decision makers, although some clearly were antisemitic. Rather, at a crucial period, when Jews needed to win support from other ethnics with whom they shared the New Deal coalition – the Irish, Italians, Germans, priests and Protestant ministers, and labor leaders – in order to urge the Roosevelt administration to liberalize implementation of the immigration laws, their help was not available. Failure to recognize that the Jewish genocide was a special case may not warrant the label “antisemitism” but insensitivity to the loss of Jewish life on an enormous scale may well be its precursor. During the depression decade Jews were simply were not popular. But neither were the Italian Americans and certainly not the African-Americans.

Clearly American Jewry overestimated the impact of the organized antisemitic effort and underestimated its ability to counteract its pernicious effect. Some may attribute it to the impact of the Depression, which tended to privatize interest and disengage Jews from political activity. But this was hardly the case for left-wing Jews who actually became hyperactive in matters such as fighting “the scourge of fascism” in Spain. Nor was the threat posed by the virulence of domestic antisemitism, which was led by marginal leaders and did not prevent Jews from recovering from the Depression more rapidly than other groups. We see that virtually every incident of what was loosely identified as antisemitism could be balanced by data which showed the threat as negligible. The antisemites argued that Jews were running the government and the Jews, in turn, were gratified that so many Jews had found high positions in the Roosevelt administration. In fact, the Jewish condition of the 1930s depended on one’s perception. There was as much evidence that vis-à-vis the administration the Jewish condition was actually hopeful, as there was of perceiving a dire threat. Nevertheless, in the 1930s the Jewish perception of antisemitism tended toward the latter. Not only did they sense that antisemitism was everywhere but they also perceived the omnipresent normative antisemitism as more threatening than it actually was. It hampered their need to build coalitions with other ethnics and to develop a strategy other than silence to combat it – a line of action that did not develop until the 1940s. This misperception would go far in explaining at least in part American Jewry’s muted reaction to the Holocaust, if indeed it was such.

What frightened American Jewry so in the 1930s that they could not fulfill the leadership role thrust upon them by a cruel history? There is one explanation for this misperception that has received insufficient emphasis by researchers. Rhetorical antisemitism of speakers such as Charles Coughlin was familiar to Jews who had lived through the 1920s. What was new was not the message, but the historical context. It was not so much the rise of antisemitism at home which, as we have seen, brought Jews to a virtual standstill during the 1920s. It was the news of what was happening in Germany carried by the press and the steady stream of prominent Jewish refugees, that so aroused their apprehension. Despite the love-hate relationship the descendants of eastern Jewish immigrants had with the “uptown” Jews, the persecution of the Jews of Germany generated a more profound shock than did the virulent antisemitism in “backward” Poland, Romania or Hungary where antisemitism was always the norm. Like their parents, the children of the Ostjuden viewed Germany as an “advanced” country, more civilized, more cultured. It was moreover a society where the “emancipation” had gone furthest and where, at least for some Jews, there was evidence that one could be both Jewish and a loyal citizen of the state. The Weimar Constitution (1919), conceived and primarily written by a Jew (Hugo Preuss), was the most liberal document of its kind at the time. Germany represented the pinnacle of hope that one could live a full Jewish life in the Diaspora. When the Nuremberg Laws (1935) virtually read German Jewry out of the pays legal, completely reversing the emancipation transaction, it came as an awesome shock to American Jewry which viewed itself as following the same path. “It would be a miracle,” declared a communal leader in 1939, “if the disease of antisemitism prevalent in fascist countries were not to make serious inroads in our own country.”³⁷ If it could happen in Germany, they thought, then it could happen anywhere, including America. Hence, they perceived the heightened antisemitism at home as evidence that it was happening there. That is what the Fortune magazine article, mentioned at the outset, was addressing. Jews even believed, falsely, that the vigor of the domestic antisemitic movement was attributable to financing sneaked into the country via the German and Italian diplomatic pouch.³⁸

Lastly, and particularly pertinent to our discussion, the rapid development of “refugee” Zionism among the masses of American Jewry can be correlated directly with the perception of a rising threat of antisemitism. Those historians who see that antisand Zionism are inextricably linked may find no better evidence than the growth of American Zionism in the 1930s. When, after a painfully slow start, the American Zionist movement finally grew by leaps and bounds it was not rooted in some esoteric knowledge of Zionist ideology, but on the simple practical consideration that European Jewry needed some place to go. They understood that, given the virulence of antisemitism and the restrictive immigration laws, there could not be a Zion in America. Some undoubtedly feared such a massive influx of Jews. The answer was Palestine whose successor, Israel, became a defining element of their Judaism. But it leaves the question of whether America’s antisemitism in the 1930s was misperceived, unresolved. The only thing we can know for certain is that both its response to the Holocaust and its opening to Zionism were manifestations of a frightened apprehensive people.

NOTES