AntiSemitism in the us at the end of the war and

in its Aftermath: attitudes toward displaceD persons

Françoise S. Ouzan[*]

Antisemitism has not been a major feature of the historical development of the United States. No law has ever existed allowing discrimination against any religion, including Judaism. Some historians have even considered antisemitism a by-product of other problems such as ‘nativism’, the animosity of native-born white Americans toward all foreigners. Yet, as Oscar Handlin noted, Jews were unique among foreigners since they were “the most prominent and the most vulnerable minorities discriminated against.”[1] When Jews were recognized as Americans, antisemitic responses were not directed at Jews as foreigners but mainly at Jews as Jews. From this perspective, the uniqueness of antisemitism in the US lies in its durability and in its recurring patterns down the centuries.[2]

This essay will attempt to reassess antisemitism in the US in the 1940s, in light of the international problem of ‘displaced persons’, a perspective unexplored thus far. It will then proceed to examine the reasons for the decline in prejudice in the late 1940s after antisemitism had reached a peak between 1944 and 1946.[3]

The first part relates to American refugee policy and anti-Jewish attitudes. The second focuses on the antipathy toward Jews in Congress and in the State Department, despite a reduction of prejudice in public opinion. The last section deals with the apparent contradiction between growing acceptance of Jewish Americans in the late 1940s and the strategy of a non-denominational lobby financed and staffed largely by Jews.

American refugee policy and anti-Jewish attitudes

In 1945 nativism continued to influence postwar American policy. It was expressed in a reluctance to admit European refugees, termed after the war ‘displaced persons’ (DPs). Yet, the new president Harry Truman viewed the question of the million European refugees who had survived the war and who opposed repatriation to their country of origin as a “world tragedy.”[4] Thus, he slowly encouraged the United States to take the lead in seeking a solution. Among the DPs, about 20 percent were Jews who languished in displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria or Italy, waiting for emigration visas to rebuild their lives.[5] No country was willing to admit them in large numbers, even America, the legendary refuge of the oppressed.

Opposition to refugee relief had been deeply engrained since the 1924 quota law (limiting the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2 percent of the number of persons from that country who were already living in the US in 1890), which was influenced by xenophobia, anti-Jewish feeling and fear of competition for jobs during the recession. Given the escalation of anti-Jewish sentiment during World War II,[6] the transformation of American attitudes toward Jews after the war was felt to be so rapid that some observers have used terms such as “still-unexplained reversal.” In 1996, American journalist Jonathan Jeremy Goldberg noted that this period still remained the least studied aspect of Jewish political power.[7] Hence this essay will focus upon a short period of time (1945–1950) in which the sea changes took place. These transformations in the American attitude toward both American Jews and Jewish European DPs took place in a period characterized by the beginnings of the Cold War but also by a lessening of prejudice following the American encounter with the Old World and the evil fostered by intolerance during World War II.

In order to grasp the change in attitudes toward Jews that occurred in the mid- and especially the late 1940s, the animosity against them in the previous decade should be recalled. At the end of the 1930s, anti-immigration sentiment was very strong both in the general public and in Congress. Thus a debate about the admission of refugees could only benefit restrictionists. “Keep the refugees out or they‘ll take our jobs” was a typical slogan.

In 1939, two-thirds of Americans expressed their opposition to special quotas for Jewish children despite their awareness that they would be doomed to severe persecution.[8] That same year, the Wagner-Rogers refugee bill proposed admission to the United States for 20,000 German Jewish children outside the quota system. But the initiative was defeated by a coalition of anti-Jewish groups comprising the Catholic Welfare Conference and conservative women's organizations which argued that no emergency justified such a measure. The comment of a cousin of President Roosevelt, Laura Delanoe, in relation to Jewish children separated from their parents who would have been rescued had they been admitted under the Wagner bill is significant in this regard: “20,000 charming children will all too soon turn into 20,000 ugly adults.”[9]

In 1940, Roosevelt’s commissioner on immigration told him that “the chances of liberalizing legislation seemed negligible” while the need for such legislation was pressing.[10] Therefore, the restrictionist atmosphere coupled with anti-Jewish feeling partly accounts for the failure to rescue European Jews. Outside New York, Nazi groups marched on American soil, fuelling antisemitism in American society, although the Nazi American Bund never totaled more than 25,000 people. Although the antisemitic campaign was conducted by more than one hundred societies, antisemitism was not part of official government policy. Bookshops dispensing anti-Jewish propaganda opened throughout the country. The publications of the Silver Shirts featured “the Jewish minority influence” and blamed Jews for all the ills of America. The American Gentile and the American Patriot flaunted headlines such as “Jewish Press Control Exposed,” and called for expulsion of the Jews who allegedly ‘owned’ America, while The American Ranger revealed that “communism is Jewish.” To crown it all, the Sunday night broadcasts of Father Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest, pictured evil Jews financially “crucifying the whole world.” Coughlin was the most influential antisemite in the country and his tirades reached more than three million people.[11] This is not surprising when one recalls that in the 1920s and 1930s antisemitism was practiced in employment, as well as in academic and social life. The signs on American beaches were indicative of this atmosphere: “No dogs or Jews allowed,” as was the rejection of students who wrote ‘Jewish’ as their nationality on the university application form, or the “Christians only” provision in the ‘jobs available’ section of newspapers.[12]

Moreover, as will be seen below, antisemitism existed in the 1930s and 1940s in the State Department which recruited prior to World War II from the most prestigious universities that were not open to Jews and included members of America’s wealthiest families. In fact, a memo from the Treasury Department written in January 1944 raised the suspicion that hostility toward rescue efforts for European Jews sprang from antisemitism.[13]

Yet, one should not underestimate the role played, too, by xenophobia in American refugee policy. Since enactment of the quota laws, American immigration legislation had reflected blatant bias and prejudice. The 1924 quota law allowed four times as many people from Britain and Ireland as from all eastern and southern Europe. Moreover, American immigration policy was not intended to exclude only Jews but to reject Catholics and ‘undesirables’ from eastern and central Europe on the ground that they found it more difficult to assimilate. “Keep America for Americans” was a common motto in the numerous patriotic societies such as the Patriotic Order Sons of America, which deemed “keeping America for Americans” a moral responsibility. Moreover, some Congressmen such as Ed Gosset from Texas called for further immigration restrictions after World War II.[14]

When information reached Washington in 1945 that Jewish DPs were still being kept behind barbed wire and were being treated worse than prisoners of war, representatives of organized Jewry reacted. At the behest of Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew appointed a commission, which was approved by President Truman in July 1945. Headed by Earl Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and former commissioner of immigration, the commission drew some strong conclusions, including the well-known, vastly exaggerated statement: “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”[15] In Bavaria, General Patton’s ill treatment of Jewish DPs and their forced repatriation to Poland was then revealed. His diary later emphasized his deep-seated antipathy toward Jews as well as his perception of Jewish refugees. On 15 September 1945, he wrote that others “believe that the displaced person is a human being, which he is not, and this applies particularly to the Jews who are lower than animals.” Nevertheless, he made a distinction between Jews who did not “lack the refinement of culture” and whom he considered “Jewish WASPS,” such as Morgenthau and others, whom he despised.[16]

Historian Yisrael Gutman pointed out that among all the DPs, “the Jewish refugees incurred the wrath of the Allied Military Authorities.” Summing up the tremendous effects of the Harrison Report on both military and public opinion, he wrote: “The occupation authorities who had viewed the DPs as a bothersome nuisance, were now forced to come to grips with the situation in the camps, heed the public outcries and the demands of the political leadership, and be attentive to the advice and complaints of the Jewish advisors attached to Allied HQ.”[17]

President Truman followed the recommendations of the Harrison Report in August 1945, although they were not approved by the State Department, which argued that the United States should not interfere with British policy in Palestine. Mostly out of sympathy for the survivors, the American president both pressed the British to provide the Jewish DPs with 100,000 certificates for Palestine and issued an executive order giving preference within the quotas to displaced persons. But the Truman Directive had a limited impact on the problem of Jewish DPs, especially due to the intricacies of red tape.

Despite the fractured nature of American Jewry in 1945, the various groups decided that action was required to provide assistance to the survivors. At that time non-Zionists neither undertook any efforts to bring Jewish DPs to the United States nor shifted the focus from Palestine, presented by the Zionists as the refuge most Jews had chosen, according to polls and various questionnaires conducted in DP camps. The notion of refuge was crucial in that period. Indeed, it was mostly related to sympathy for those seeking a shelter and trying to rebuild their lives after a catastrophe. As William Haber, the Jewish adviser to the American government stated, after the establishment of the State of Israel: “The DP camps have served their historic purpose by emphasizing the need for a Jewish homeland.” Historian Edward Shapiro rightly pointed out that the public attitude toward Palestine was not devoid of anti-immigrant overtones. Yet most Americans felt that the Shoah had shown the need for a Jewish homeland and that Jews had historical claims on Palestine.[18]

However, when in 1946 the prospect of British Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin allowing 100,000 Jews into Palestine appeared to be strongly hampered, the leaders of the non-Zionist American Jewish Committee and of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism decided to set up a lobby for the enactment of special immigration legislation on behalf of DPs. In December 1946, the Citizens’ Committee on Displaced Persons (CCDP) was established. Although staffed mainly by Jews, given the strong feeling against bringing in more Jewish refugees until the late 1940s, the lobby presented itself as non-denominational since it was thought that no Jewish group could be at the forefront in seeking alterations in American immigration policy.

When non-Zionists became aware of the fact that no other nation was willing to welcome their coreligionists in great numbers, they decided to shoulder the burden of resettlement, providing that immigrants would not become a ‘public charge’. Two-thirds of the one million dollar budget of the CCDP came from the family of wealthy art collector Lessing Rosenwald, a prominent anti-Zionist. Given the pervasive hostility toward refugees, both in Congress and in public opinion, special efforts were required to bring Jewish DPs to American shores without arousing an antisemitic response. It should be noted here that most Americans wrongly assumed that the majority of DPs were Jewish.[19]

The main target of the pressure group was to bring 100,000 Jewish DPs to America. But because it was contrary to the American tradition for legislation to specify the religion of immigrants and because Jewish survivors were estimated to be 20 or 25 percent of the total,[20] its members called for a law that would admit 400,000 DPs of all faiths over four years. To achieve this they launched a broad campaign of education and persuasion to make public and Congressional opinion receptive to such a legislative move.

In order to neutralize antisemitic opposition in Congress the disguised Jewish lobby systematically downplayed the number of Jews, constantly emphasizing that more than three-quarters of the DPs were Christian. Further in their numerous publications members of the group continued to describe the DPs as survivors of concentration camps, which was far from the truth, for two reasons. First, among the Balts and Ukrainians there were Nazi sympathizers, a fact repeated in numerous cables of UNRRA officials to the Allied armies, which required a screening procedure. Yet the military were more concerned by the presence of communist sympathizers than of former Nazis. Second, most of the Jewish DPs were not actually survivors of the death camps but wartime refugees from the Soviet Union who often came in family groups. Numerous Polish and Baltic Jews had fled to the Soviet Union where they had starved but had not been under Nazi rule. Many of them came from Soviet gulags, where they had encountered the hardships of the camps.[21]

In the campaign launched by the CCDP such issues were carefully avoided. Its members might not have known that the survivors of Nazi camps had been the first to leave for Palestine or other countries. Typical Jewish publicity featured the story of a Jew who planned to settle far from New York or Chicago, two cities where the Jewish population was considered to be high. It was a powerful argument used to persuade Congressmen who feared a ‘flood’ of potentially subversive Jewish immigrants from the East.

In this context, fighting antisemitism in America was no easy task. It could certainly not be done openly but rather under cover of sympathy and tolerance for the war refugees at large. Thus, the greater number of non-Jewish DPs (80 percent) was emphasized as well as the involvement of Christian organizations. For instance, the CCDP urged American newspapers to print an editorial on 8 May 1947, the second anniversary of VE Day, entitled “Send These, the Homeless, the Tempest Tossed to Me,” which stated that “only one of five (DPs) is Jewish,” the word ‘only’ seemingly expressing a form of surrender to prejudice on the part of the CCDP.[22]

Antipathy against Jews in Congress and

in the State Department

Since opposition to bringing more refugees to the United States, and especially Jewish ones suspected of being subversive, was openly expressed, the American Jewish Committee and the American Council for Judaism had agreed on the formation of the CCDP as a non-sectarian lobby. Earl Harrison, a WASP, whose report on Jewish DPs caused such an impact, chaired the committee. Aware of the strong prejudices in Congress and of its restrictive immigration policy, the CCDP functioned as a lobby devoted to informing both the conservative Republican Congress and the public about the plight of the Jewish DPs who languished in DP camps and had no place to go to rebuild their lives. More importantly, it underlined the necessity for the United States to take its ‘fair share’ of those postwar refugees, thus creating a favorable climate for legislation among the public and Congressmen alike.

Although the American Congress received more mail on helping DPs than on any other subject since Prohibition, the bill drafted by the lobby and introduced on 1 April 1947 by a congressman from Illinois – William Stratton – was not approved. A provision would have allowed for 400,000 DPs in the following two years. Indeed, letters received sporadically by Congressmen expressed fears about “radicals and undesirables” and the “scum of southern and eastern Europe,” terms likely to cover up prejudices against Jews. A number of letters still equated refugee with Jew and Jew with communist. The battle in Congress was long and fierce and it was only on 25 June 1948 that the DP Act was enacted. However, as demonstrated below, it showed antisemitism at work. Harrison called it a “booby trap” since it discriminated on religious, national and occupational grounds, and contained a provision to admit the Volksdeutsche, ethnic Germans known as the ‘Nazi fifth column’. President Truman signed it reluctantly while denouncing the act as antisemitic and anti-Catholic. On that last point, he was ill-informed because Catholics were the most numerous among both DPs and the Volksdeutsch. Moses Leavitt from the American Joint Distribution Committee voiced what most American Jews thought: “There is no doubt… that the bill was especially designed to keep out Jewish immigrants.”[23]

Three provisions of the law were interpreted as being antisemitic. First, only individuals who had been granted DP status on 22 December 1945 might be considered for admission to the United States. This provision excluded a large number of Jews who had entered Germany after having returned to their town or village only to find that their families had been exterminated. A second discriminatory provision stipulated that at least 40 percent of the DPs should come from countries annexed by foreign powers, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, where few Jews were left after the Holocaust. A third provision favored farmers or agricultural laborers. What became known as ‘the agricultural preference’ (at least 30 percent) was justified by the need of American agriculture for labor; however, it discriminated indirectly against Jewish populations who were mostly urban dwellers. After two years of intense lobbying by the CCDP, in June 1950 the law was amended: the cut-off date was changed from 22 December 1945 to 1 January 1949 and other restrictions were deleted.[24]

With the Cold War, the foreign policy factor assumed crucial importance since it engendered a total change of attitude on the part of some members of Congress. For instance, while Senator Wiley of Wisconsin had been active in promoting the restrictions of the 1948 DP law, he changed his mind entirely and agreed to amend the act when he realized that if America were to win the Cold War it was necessary to open the doors to anti-communist refugees, stating: “It will be an ideological weapon in our ideological war against the forces of darkness, the forces of communist tyranny.”[25] Jewish DPs from Eastern Europe, too, could then be considered refugees fleeing communism. From victims of oppression they became ideological weapons, demonstrating that immigration policy might have foreign policy ramifications.

Although the CCDP campaign was skillfully conducted, the shift in American refugee policy, which raised the number of DPs who might enter the country to 400,000 in 1950, cannot entirely be ascribed to the efforts of this umbrella organization. The CCDP represented a couple of hundred, mostly ethnic organizations, and based its activities above all on humanitarian arguments. It alerted officials and Congressmen, marshaled political support and published an extensive literature in which they avoided mentioning the occupations of refugees whom people might consider Jewish, such as tailor, attorney or physician.[26]

The Cold War placed the restrictionists in Congress in a serious dilemma. Foreign policy considerations were represented by the White House and the State Department, where restrictionism prevailed and was sometimes mistaken for antisemitism. What was the real attitude of the State Department toward the Jewish wartime refugees and toward Displaced Persons?

While there is no doubt that antisemitism existed during the 1930s and 1940s, it is far from obvious that it was the primary motivation behind policies concerning Jewish refugees. historians Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut point out that since this issue was emotionally charged, one must not jump to the conclusion that anti-Jewish feeling was pervasive; they suggest an assessment of individual policy makers measured against a yardstick of prejudice. For instance, publicist Norman Podhoretz’s definition is helpful in that it suggests that the essence of antisemitism is the application of a double standard to Jews and non-Jews. Yet, through four case-studies conducted between 1933 and 1944, Breitman and Kraut conclude that the policies and behavior toward refugees “often lacked a double standard,” implying that even if the State Department were influenced by antisemitism, other motives “even more powerful than ethnic prejudice” prevented the immigration of Jews threatened by Nazi Germany.[27]

Among these motives we find the restrictionist attitude, which assumed the lack of assimilability of certain groups of refugees such as Europe‘s poor, in particular East Europeans. This implied the exclusion of more than just Jews. Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long’s attitude toward refugees triggered off a major controversy among historians. On the one hand, Henry Feingold accused him of harboring deep antisemitic feelings, while on the other, Saul Friedman observed that he was cordial to the Jews, although he created a visa ‘bottleneck’ that turned out to be tragic for the refugees who were mostly Jews.[28]

Historian Robert Wistrich attributes the prevailing anti-Jewish climate of those years to “a disinclination to act upon Jewish requests, along with bureaucratic routinism, indifference and more than a tinge of antisemitism… among high-ranking American and British officials as well as among Allied military leaders.”[29] The belated creation of the War Refugee Board in early 1944 also implied that for the first time during the war years the question of Jewish refugee relief was not as dependent as it used to be on the reluctant stand of both the Foreign Office and the State Department but also on an Allied government agency created by the Roosevelt administration for rescue purposes.[30]

Besides recognizing Breckinridge Long’s prejudices, one has to realize that he feared more internal subversion by Nazi spies and communist agents among the refugees than he did Jews themselves. This reflects a consensus in the State Department that favored restriction to protect the nation against various ills. In their eyes, national interest had to prevail over humanitarianism.[31]

For historian Philip Baram, anti-Zionism rather than anti-Jewish feeling motivated the attitude of the State Department toward Jews during World War II. Anti-Zionism sprang from American willingness to ‘accommodate’ its British allies who governed Palestine, as well as from the desire to pacify the Arabs who would thus favor ARAMCO (Arabian American Oil Company) over British oil interests and would not be involved with the Russians.[32] This attitude was confirmed after World War II when President Truman’s Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal repeatedly reminded him of the need for Saudi Arabian oil. Forrestal believed that Truman was only interested in Jewish votes for the 1948 election. Yet, the American president had answered that he would handle the situation “in the light of justice, not oil,” since he thought that a Jewish homeland was “a basic human problem.” One of the president’s closest advisors, Attorney General Clark Clifford, reported Truman’s words: “Everyone else who’s been dragged from his country has some place to go back.”[33] But Forrestal worked with others within the Truman administration to undermine the president’s determination: the cabal included Undersecretaries of State Dean Acheson and Robert Lovett who had allies outside the government, especially among the oil companies. Again, anti-Zionism seemed to be linked to a vision of ‘national interest’, until the Soviet-Palestine link was perceived as a problem once the potential Jewish state became intertwined with the Cold War.

Nevertheless, in the fall of 1946, the State Department helped promote Congressional approval of American membership in the new International Refugee Organization (IRO), whose aim was to resettle DPs. The State Department had undergone a strong shift from the war years under Breckinridge Long. Cold War considerations suppressed that fear since Jewish DPs were also presented by the CCDP as people fleeing communism. Besides, preventing the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine made the support of DP legislation almost inevitable.

Another example of the important role of the Cold War in relation to American Jews and DPs in the State Department was the controversy over the admission of members of the so-called Baltic Legion. Although the DP Commission had disqualified them from immigration, the Lutheran Resettlement Service (LRS) supported their entry into the United States. According to Section 13 of the 1948 DP Act, both SS and Waffen SS units “bore arms against the United States”[34]; nevertheless, the State Department eventually decided that soldiers of the Baltic Legion “were largely forcibly recruited” and were therefore eligible for entry into the US. The response of Cordelia Cox, resettlement director of the LRS, to the negative position of Jewish organizations is worth quoting: “It does not seem reasonable to assume that in a country where so much antisemitism exists, a Jewish group could influence a State Department decision against the largest groups of Protestants among DPs.”[35] Since Catholics cooperated with Lutherans, the State Department and the DP Commission capitulated, demonstrating the limits of the influence of the Jewish lobby. Thus, in this period, which was characterized by contradictory trends, the discrepancy between the bureaucrats, on the one hand, and the general public, on the other, should not be underestimated.[36]

The apparent contradiction between the CCDP’S low profile strategy and the growing acceptance of Jews within American society

Four elements should be borne in mind when examining this apparent contradiction: the general reduction of prejudice after World War II, the struggle for the creation of the State of Israel, the marginalization of Holocaust consciousness among American Jewry and the participation of Jews in the re-emergence of religion.

In the early 1940s, Jews were unacceptable to many employers, notably hotels, country clubs and holiday resorts. Moreover, jokes about ‘kikes’ were commonplace. It was therefore not surprising that Jewish community leaders advised coreligionists not to draw attention to themselves as Jews and not to associate themselves with any group considered foreign to American society. In a 1942 public opinion poll Jews were listed third behind the Germans and the Japanese in answer to the question: “Which group menaces the country most?” Consequently, American Jewry feared that antisemitism would continue after the war. Further, the conflict between America and Germany was presented as a struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, marginalizing the perception of antisemitism as an evil to be fought, despite the fact that it was the most significant element within Nazi ideology. According to historian Leonard Dinnerstein, although the Jew still remained an outsider in a Christian country, conflicting American attitudes and traditions of tolerance have minimized the impact of antisemitism in certain periods as opposed to times of crisis.”[37]

Significantly, the proportion of Americans agreeing that Jews were a ‘threat’ to America fell from 24 percent in 1944 to 5 percent in 1950.[38] In early 1945, a poll found that 58 percent of Americans believed that Jews had too much power. Nevertheless, nearly every survey of antisemitism taken after 1946 showed a rapid reduction.[39] It is impossible to determine precisely to what extent knowledge of the murder of six million Jews contributed to this change.

In the aftermath of the war, non-Jews tried to avoid expressing prejudicial remarks. To the question “Have you heard any criticism or talk against the Jews in the last six months,” the answers showed a decline, with the most significant changes occurring from 1946 to 1951. In 1946, 64 percent responded positively whereas in 1950 only 24 percent did so. Two significant events illustrate the growing acceptance of Jews as expressed through public opinion, in contrast to the anti-Jewish feelings nourished by the elite. In 1945 Bess Myerson was elected as the first and only Jewish Miss America. Her parents were not assimilated Jews but part of the Jewish immigrant, working class, left-wing culture of New York City and the family spoke Yiddish at home.[40] However, Bess Myerson, who refused to change her name, received fewer bookings and invitations from American industrial firms than the previous women who held the title. This is not surprising considering the fact that many companies worked through a network of social clubs or ‘country clubs’ which excluded Jews from membership.

The awarding of the 1947 Oscar for best picture to Gentlemen’s Agreement, the film version of Laura Hobson’s novel about antisemitism, also marked a turning point. Its success should be understood within the context of Hollywood films picturing racial and ethnic prejudice. Also in 1947, another major film, a thriller, produced by RKO, Crossfire and based on a novel about homophobia, attacked postwar antisemitism, along with all intolerance and hatred. The producers of these films received public recognition for exploring the consequences of antisemitism and both movies were nominated in the category of best picture of the year by the Motion Picture Academy. Gentleman’s Agreement had the greatest impact since both the book and the movie unmasked those who concealed their prejudice behind refined conformity and gentility, conduct often found among the elite. The novel was a best seller in 1947 and the movie was viewed by millions of Americans. Growing acceptance of Jews in the public arena was thus perceived in the fall of the year 1947. It is relevant to note that the film Gentlemen’s Agreement portrayed antisemitism as a sociological phenomenon devoid of any historical roots. Jews were not depicted as a marginal group but as any other ethnic group and as such could be integrated into the mainstream.

Until the late 1940s, Jewish themes had not been popular. It was only then that Jews in Hollywood felt sufficiently secure to tackle such a topic at a time when the large majority of American people supported the idea of a Jewish state. Film executive Robert Blumofe corroborates this change:

Most of us… had the feeling that we were homeless, waiflike people who got pushed around, not really accepted. And suddenly Israel, even to the least Jewish of us, represented status of some sort. It meant that we did have a homeland. It meant that we did have an identity. It meant that we were no longer the stereotype of the Jew: the moneylender, the Jew businessman. These were fighters and they were farmers and they revived the land there.[41]

The American public had been receiving information about postwar refugees from various sources. At the initiative of the CCDP, RKO Pictures produced Passport to Nowhere, a movie distributed nationally about the hopeless plight of displaced persons and their need for a refuge. By May 1948, millions of Americans had seen the film.[42] Antisemitism was no longer morally acceptable after the extermination of six million European Jews. America was triumphant and expanding economically so that it did not need a stereotyped scapegoat. During that period the American Jewish Committee sponsored five volumes of Studies in Prejudice. The avalanche of studies, movies and critical assessments thus reflected national interest. The CCDP had launched a successful educational campaign with far-reaching results: editorials, articles and cartoons in magazines such as Collier’s, Life, America and The New Republic were using its materials, illustrating the nature of prejudice.

To appreciate this transformation, one has to remember that only a few years previously, in 1944, Jews had been a target when the House of Un-American Activities Committee had begun its probe of communist influence in Hollywood. The three-year witch-hunt, led mostly by Senator John Rankin, had ruined dozens of entertainment figures, among them numerous Jews. Nevertheless, a few defense groups, led by the Anti-Defamation League, had reacted by cooperating with the investigators to help prove that most Jews were not communists. It was then that the notion arose that an anti-communist crusader was an antisemite in disguise just as a restrictionist in Congress was often perceived by Jewish Americans as a euphemism for antisemite. This was not true in all cases, although a link may have existed.[43]

In 1946, when Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy began his hunt for communists, he did his best to avoid the accusation of antisemitism by placing a Jew at his right hand, New York lawyer Roy Cohn, and by meeting with representatives of the Anti-Defamation League. Beyond these political tactics, it is relevant to note that as individuals certain American Jews, such as Roy Cohn, had acquired the power to confer respectability − and respectability is a key notion in the integration process.

In July 1947, President Truman’s address to Congress entitled “Admission of Displaced Persons, a Source of Strength,” prefigured a change of attitude toward refugees. In December 1948, an article in Fortune appeared with the headline “Welcome Immigrants!” and another in Newsweek in April 1949, entitled “Haven for the Homeless,” demonstrated sympathy for the plight of refugees, Jews and non-Jews alike. In August 1949, The Saturday Evening Post’s headline read “How Are the DPs Doing in America?” Displaced Persons, again non-Jews and Jews alike, were pictured as hard-working people, eager to be integrated into American society and symbolizing new blood for America. A five-page article published in the New York Times of March 1948 and entitled “We Have Become Alive,” discussed the remarkable efforts of Displaced Persons – orphans, Jews and non-Jews – to adapt to the ‘American way of life’.[44] European Jewish Displaced Persons benefited from the expanding tolerance and sympathy exhibited toward refugees in general and toward eastern and central European Christians fleeing communist tyranny during the late 1940s and 1950s, in particular.

The fact that the non-denominational Jewish lobby did not focus on European Jews tended to suppress the equation made in Congress before 1948: DP=Jew=Communist. When Senator Wiley of Wisconsin became aware that same year that the DPs who had fled communist countries could represent symbols of the failure of communism and thus be used as an ‘ideological weapon’ in the Cold War, Congress and public opinion became less reluctant to admit DPs when they were described as victims or potential victims of communism.[45] The CCDP then repeatedly emphasized that Jews, too, were fleeing from communist-leaning countries. Following fierce debates, Congress finally amended the discriminatory DP law in 1950. This legislation paved the way to the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, which enabled former Jewish DPs, too, to reach American shores. Nevertheless, it is worth recalling that by 1950 most of the Jewish DPs had already emigrated: two-thirds to Palestine/Israel and one-third to America and other countries. It remains debatable as to whether most Jewish DPs would have emigrated to America had the country opened its doors earlier, as historian Yehuda Bauer thought they would have,[46] or if a sense of destiny stemming from the Holocaust, a painful awareness of the impossibility of building a new life outside Eretz Israel would have prevailed, as historian Yisrael Gutman – himself a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto and Maydanek – believed.[47]

Historian Lucy Davidowicz demonstrated how, as a consequence of the war experience, a rise of religiosity characterized postwar America, a development that had not been anticipated in the secular 1930s. In participating in the re-emergence of religion, Jews in the United States acted as Americans, sharing also the typically American pattern of moving out to the suburbs. There, the synagogue was not only the place of worship but the cultural center which turned out to be the prime vehicle of American Jewish identity. To the reasons for the increase of tolerance in American social life, Davidowicz adds the general mood of optimism that resulted from the victory over fascism, the euphoria resulting from the economic boom as America became a middle-class country and popular support for the creation of a Jewish state.[48]

The creation of the state of Israel

and the new acceptance of Jews

According to the eminent historian Arthur Hertzberg, the birth of the State of Israel solved two basic problems for Jews in America. The first concerned their relationship with the American pioneer myth; the second was connected in a positive way to the question of a homeland. The Jews in Palestine who were fighting both the British and the Arabs were no longer perceived as victims of persecution but as pioneers on a dangerous frontier. Americans tended to view Jews in Palestine as a heroic people and Americans in general could establish a parallel between Jews and American settlers fighting Indians to bring civilization to unfriendly territories. The battle for the State of Israel thus became entwined with the American frontier myth, first because the United States was born out of a revolt against British colonialism, and second because a parallel between Indians and Arabs could be drawn. This caused most Americans to shed their residual antisemitism as Jews were depicted as being more western than oriental.[49]

The pictures and captions in one of the most widely circulated magazines in the United States, National Geographic, reinforced this new perception and image of Jews, while stressing a parallel between the Zionist and the American dream before the creation of the Jewish state. A report entitled “Palestine Today” noted the Holocaust which had ended only sixteen months earlier and provided a matter-of-fact account of “refugees and displaced persons” reclaiming the place “where Jews have lived since Biblical times.” One of the pictures illustrating brave survivors showed a teenager planting tomato seedlings. The caption read that her “parents may have been among the six million Jews massacred in Europe.” Two articles appearing in the autumn of 1947 contrasted the backwardness of the Arabs with westernized Jews, and dangerous Arab lands with snapshots of Zionist irrigation projects that “make the desert bloom.”[50]

The story of the Wild West was transposed to the Middle East by Hollywood writer Leon Uris, in his novel Exodus, published in 1956. Exodus came to be the bible of most American Jews who liked to picture themselves as heroic as the Jews in Israel. They were the new ‘cowboys’ in an ‘americanized’ Middle East. The 1948 War of Independence and its unexpected successful outcome transformed the historic image of the Jew from dependence to self-reliance. Before the creation of the State of Israel, the large majority of recent immigrants had no positive feelings about their countries of origin where they had suffered open antisemitism. Therefore, the establishment of the State of Israel offered American Jews a homeland in which they could take pride just like any other ethnic group. The Jewish state not only gave Jews in America a legitimate homeland, it also brought them a form of respectability in relation to the idea of ‘chosenness’. It embodied the miracle of a nation arising after two thousand years and this redemption was of crucial importance in light of the rise of religiosity in postwar America. Furthermore, sympathy for the plight of the survivors as expressed by President Truman also nourished the American Jewish identity. Thanks to his prompt recognition of the State of Israel, Jewish fears of being accused of dual loyalty for supporting the creation of a Jewish state vanished. The creation of the State of Israel helped both American Jews and Jewish DPs gain acceptance in American society.

CONCLUSIONS

In sum, four points may be emphasized. First, the unprecedented decline in anti-Jewish feelings in the late 1940s was part of a general waning of prejudice in the aftermath of a world war which had brought together people from foreign cultures and different social backgrounds, as Lucy Davidowicz demonstrated in her book aptly entitled On Equal Terms. It turned out to be a firsthand encounter of two worlds: the New World with the old one. Within the space of five years, America’s image of the Jew underwent a major transformation, from conspiratorial foreigner to good neighbor at a time when Jewish DPs were trying to gain admittance in America. When resettled by the United Service for New Americans (USNA), a main Jewish resettling organization, the former DPs became ‘new Americans’. The terminology, pregnant with meaning, testified both to the desire to neutralize antisemitic tendencies among American citizens and to the wish to blot out Jewish distinctiveness.

Second, antisemitism had not ended after the war but from the mid-1940s onwards, as knowledge of the Holocaust spread, it became no longer morally acceptable to be antisemitic in public. The resiliency of anti-Jewish prejudice seems to lie both in the discrepancy between the elite and the general public and between a public and private attitude. This gap was exemplified by the recent and unexpected discovery (July 2003) in the archives of the Truman Library of a page of the president’s diary dated 21 July 1947, which voiced antisemitic attitudes. According to excerpts released by the American National Archives, President Truman wrote of a conversation with Henry Morgenthau Jr. about postwar immigration of Jewish DPs to Palestine and vented annoyance at Jews. This probably occurred at a time when he was overworked and under continuous Zionist pressure. The diary entry expressed the antisemitic tendencies of deep America and in particular, of Independence, Missouri, where he had been brought up. This point is confirmed in the second volume of Memoirs by Harry S. Truman, in which the following comment appears:

I kept my faith in the rightness of my policy in spite of some of the Jews. When I say ‘Jews’, I mean, of course, the extreme Zionists. I know that most Americans of Jewish faith, while they hoped for the restoration of a Jewish homeland, are and always have been Americans first and foremost.[51]

Here the stereotype of Jews as dishonest people is conveyed through the idea of a possible dual loyalty found among ‘extreme Zionists’. Viewed from this perspective, it is ironic that by promptly recognizing the State of Israel, President Truman put an end to Jewish fears of being accused of dual loyalty for supporting the creation of a Jewish state.

The personal thoughts of Harry Truman in his recently discovered diary reveal that he was a man of his time as far as prejudice is concerned, although he was and is highly respected in the public arena and in history as a progressive national leader. We are reminded by his entries of the classical antisemitic canard of Jews caring only for themselves and seeking American intervention for their own selfish interests, as they were accused of doing on the eve of World War II by members of America First, a movement created by Charles Lindbergh. Some passages from Truman’s diary are also worth quoting in this light:

The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgment on world affairs… The Jews, I find are very very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as DPs as long as they get special treatment.[52]

This list is not quite accurate as one would expect Lithuanians rather than Finns, but what Truman expressed here is deep anger at the Zionist leaders who, he thought, were interested only in their own goals instead of taking into account the complexity of international affairs.

Apart from the recurring motif of ‘special treatment’ required by the Jews, the notion of ‘underdog’ is crucial to an understanding of anti-Jewish feeling. As long as the Jew remains a victim, an ‘underdog’, he is accepted by others. The vastly exaggerated statement that follows is reminiscent of the ‘dialectics of the master and the slave’, the slave being the Jew or underdog:

Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog… Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist, he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.[53]

A third point in the transformation of the image of the Jew in the public arena as opposed to the private sphere is what “did not happen” at the threshold of the 1950s. Why was there no wave of popular antisemitism following the 1950 arrest of the Rosenbergs along with Harry Gold, David Greenglass and Klaus Fuchs, Jews with communist sympathies? Indeed, a poll during the Rosenberg trial found that 5 percent of the public identified Jews with communism.[54] Was it due to the educational campaign of the Jewish lobby showing that many refugees (Jews and non-Jews alike) had fled communism? Or should it to be attributed to the new acceptance of American Jews resulting from their occupational status and their high educational achievement? Undoubtedly, a number of factors had interacted to bring about this transformation of perceptions in which morality, humanitarian concerns and the necessities of the Cold War played a part. It is also significant to underline that after World War II and during the Cold War, Holocaust awareness had moved to the margins of American Jewish consciousness although there were some early attempts by Holocaust survivors to build memorials. Nevertheless, the rarity of monuments reflected an effort not to draw attention to the link between Jews and communism. French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs used the term ‘collective memory’, to denote the fact that present concerns are more likely to influence what we remember from the past and that our remembrance of it includes all the simplifications and ambiguities inherent in this process.[55]

Last, but not least, the creation of the State of Israel helped erase old stereotypes of the Jew among the general public more quickly than among the elite. Furthermore, the discrepancy between the elite and the masses seems to have been one of the reasons justifying the continuation of a strategy of low visibility by the non-denominational lobby staffed by American Jews.[56] Following Israel’s victory in the June 1967 Six Day War, Jews in America discovered a sense of pride since the Jewish state had been perceived as a geopolitical underdog and accepted as such. Indeed, much of the American media focused on the courage of the new state whose democratic values clashed with those of Arab countries. As shown by available data in the 1960s, hostile attitudes toward Jews found less support in those years than at any other time.[57] Growing willingness to mingle with Jews in various situations was increasingly more expressed, to the extent that an overwhelming majority were ready to accept individual Jews as ‘next-door neighbors’,[58] a key notion in the American mentality.