FDR used the Jews, and the Jews tried to enlist the Republicans for their cause
Rafael Medoff publishes a fascinating interview with Professor Ben Zion Netanyahu z"l in which the Prime Minister's late father discusses
his activities in the US in the 1940's on behalf of European Jewry.
What about the Jewish advisers within Roosevelt’s inner circle?
FDR used Jews if they served some purpose that he needed. Samuel Rosenman was useful to him as a speechwriter. Henry Morgenthau Jr. was useful to him as secretary of the Treasury. Only a certain kind of a Jew could reach that position in Roosevelt’s administration – the kind of Jew who would not talk about Jewish issues or problems.
FDR used the Jews, but there was no room in his heart for the plight of the Jewish people. In his mind, the suffering of Europe’s Jews was not included in the “Four Freedoms,” the four great principles for which America was fighting in World War II. Roosevelt had no time for the problems of the Jews.
(Prof. Netanyahu’s assessment was privately shared, at the time, even by many within the Jewish establishment. Coincidentally, on the morning of our conversation, I spent some time doing research at the Central Zionist Archives, and came upon the transcript of a meeting in 1944 between Nahum Goldmann and the Jewish Agency Executive, including David Ben-Gurion.
Goldmann, who was cochairman of the World Jewish Congress as well as the agency’s representative in Washington, had come to Jerusalem to brief the agency’s leaders on the political situation in the US capital.
Goldmann told them Roosevelt was only “superficially sympathetic” to the suffering of European Jewry. He said, “It is impossible to educate the president, because he will only let you see him once every six months, for 30 minutes, and he spends the first 10 minutes chatting and telling stories.”)
Just before Yom Kippur in 1943, the Bergson Group (led by activist Hillel Kook, who was known as Peter Bergson) and the Vaad Hahatzalah (an Orthodox rescue committee based in New York City) mobilized more than 400 rabbis to march to the White House to plead for rescue. The president refused to meet with a delegation of their leaders.
Later, a columnist for one of the Yiddish newspapers wrote that if 400 priests had come to the White House, the president would not have refused to see them. Was there indeed a double standard applied to Jewish concerns?
To answer that question, just consider how the international community would have responded if millions of Englishmen or Frenchmen were the ones who were being annihilated, rather than millions of Jews. Would the world have just stood by, quietly?
Would you have needed to have protest groups organizing marches and taking out newspaper ads in order to wake up the world’s conscience? No. The nations of the world would have immediately risen in angry protest, without any prompting. They would never would have allowed such a thing to continue. But when the Jews were the victims, it was a different story. It was as if the Jews were untouchables. It was as if the nations did not want to besmirch their hands by touching the Jews.
What could American Jewish leaders have done to change Roosevelt’s position?
Roosevelt understood the language of political power. Jewish leaders should have done, and could have done, what my colleagues and I did – we went to the Republicans. And then Roosevelt got the message. We built relationships with Republican members of Congress, and leaders of the Republican Party such as [former president Herbert] Hoover and [1936 presidential nominee Alf] Landon, and we lobbied them before the Republican Convention in 1944. They put a plank in their party platform that year calling for “unrestricted immigration and land ownership” for Jews in Palestine and it called for making Palestine a “free and democratic commonwealth” for the Jewish people. That was the first time one of America’s political parties took such a position.
Read the whole thing. Make sure not to miss his comments about Stephen Wise at the end. I find it amazing that 70 years after the fact, most American Jews have no clue that their people were sold out by Roosevelt. I rememberr reading my first book about it (
While Six Million Died) when I was still in high school, and being completely shocked because my parents were good Democrats and would never have had a bad word to say about FDR.
Labels: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Holocaust, Peter Bregson
'Vinegar the son of wine'
In a post four years ago, I explained that the Talmud refers to a wicked person who is the son of a righteous person as '
vinegar the son of wine.' Here's another example:
J Street's Jeremy Ben Ami.
Ben-Ami’s paternal grandparents were, indeed, Zionist heroes. At great personal risk they moved from Czarist Russia to the Land of Israel as part of the First Aliyah (wave of immigration) of the late nineteenth century. They were among 66 Palestinian Jewish families who defied the warnings of their own community’s leaders and purchased a large plot of land from Arab effendis in 1909 on the sand dunes north of Jaffa. The families then conducted a lottery on the beach to distribute the plots on which they would build their individual homes — thus laying the foundation for Tel Aviv, the “first Hebrew city.” Two years ago Tel Aviv’s municipality celebrated the centennial of the city’s founding. Ben-Ami and his children took part in a ceremony reenacting the 1909 lottery on the beach along with other descendants of the original Jewish families.
Writing about the event in the New York Times, Ben-Ami hailed his grandparents’ generation of Zionist settlers who created Tel Aviv as a center of Jewish learning, culture, and commerce. But he then contrasted that noble achievement with the allegedly atavistic attitudes toward the Palestinian Arabs of the “Netanyahu/Lieberman government.” Further, Ben-Ami bemoaned the fact that “in America, reflexive support for Israel’s every move — no matter how morally questionable or strategically counterproductive — continues to guide the established institutions and voices of the American Jewish community. Critics of Israeli policy are too often labeled enemies of the Jewish people, rather than engaged in open and intelligent debate over what is best for Israel and for U.S. interests in the region.”
Jeremy’s father, Yitzhak Ben-Ami, was also a Zionist hero and a rebel. Growing up in Tel Aviv in the 1920s and 30s, the elder Ben-Ami dissented from the official Jewish leadership’s political line and joined Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground military organization that frequently retaliated forcefully against Arab attacks and eventually launched an armed revolt against the British mandatory authority. Ben-Ami spent most of the war years in the United States as one of the leaders of an Irgun delegation trying to build international support for transforming Palestine into a Jewish state.
When news of the Nazi extermination plan for Europe’s Jews was confirmed by the U.S. State Department in November 1942, Ben-Ami and his colleagues suspended their Zionist activities and threw all their energies into publicizing the plight of the remaining European Jews under threat of annihilation. Known also as the “Bergson group” (after their leader Peter Bergson) they established the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe and launched a public lobbying effort to pressure the Roosevelt administration into trying — by any diplomatic or military means available — to rescue the remnant of European Jewry.
The Committee attracted support from Jews and non-Jews alike and from across the political spectrum (including celebrities such as writers Ben Hecht, Max Lerner, and I.F. Stone, Democratic Congressman Will Rogers Jr., and the prominent Republican Senator Guy Gillette). Aside from the Roosevelt administration’s calculated indifference, the biggest obstacle the Emergency Committee faced in trying to make rescuing European Jews part of America’s war aims was the hostility and obstructionism of large parts of the Jewish establishment.
No single figure did more to undermine the Committee’s work than Rabbi Stephen Wise of Temple Emmanuel, undisputed boss of several national Jewish organizations and often referred to as “King of the Jews.” On the day that Ben-Ami and his colleagues were leading 100 orthodox rabbis in a demonstration in front of the White House to protest the Roosevelt administration’s inaction on rescue, Wise was advising administration officials that the Bergson group “did not represent Jewish thinking in America.” Wise viewed the young Palestinians and their American supporters as interlopers and even tried to get Ben-Ami and his colleagues deported. Accused by Wise of being a draft dodger, Ben-Ami then enlisted in the American Army.
Read the whole thing.
Ben Ami's forbears must be ashamed of what he is doing, particularly as he portrays himself as the successor to their paths.
Labels: J Street, Jeremy Ben Ami, Peter Bregson, Tel Aviv, Yitzhak Ben Ami
When the son spoils the father's legacy
I discussed Jeremy Ben Ami's father's membership in the Irgun as a possible motivating factor in Jeremy's founding of J Street at great length
here. Sol Stern discusses the
hypocrisy of Ben Ami in attempting to cloak himself with his father's Irgun membership.
The situation today is almost reversed. Whatever else one might say about AIPAC and the current “establishment,” American Jewish leaders have apparently learned the dreadful lessons of the 1940s. On the other hand it is the J Street “dissidents” who seem indifferent to the fact that Israel’s five million Jews are threatened with either physical destruction or politicide by a new international coalition of Jew haters. In that circumstance it is perfectly reasonable for American Jews to express their solidarity with whatever government Israelis have chosen (at the ballot box) to lead them in the current emergency.
Freely choosing to express solidarity with Israel hardly turns American Jews into unthinking dupes of the “establishment.” On the other hand, it is hard to see what exactly is so “pro-Israel” about an organization like J Street that frequently gives aid and comfort to those who would put the elected Israeli government in the dock, while also turning a blind eye to Palestinian rejectionism.
Even more galling is the fact that J Street’s damage is accompanied by a phony siren song of victimhood. At the organization’s recent conference in Washington, D.C., speaker after speaker celebrated the fact that “pro-peace” J Street was finally giving the powerful “Jewish establishment” (presumably not in favor of peace) a run for its money. Conference speakers boasted of “conquering the campuses” (with chapters at over 40 colleges), of garnering 180,000 supporters, of the hundreds of honorable rabbis and the 30 progressive Jewish organizations who have now enlisted in the cause. “Our voices are being heard,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami.
Yet almost in the same breath, Ben-Ami conjured up an imminent suppression of those voices by that same old, all powerful Jewish establishment. J Street’s right-wing enemies are trying to shut us up, he said, to deny our right to free speech, and thus end any possibility of open debate in the Jewish community about the serious problems facing Israel. The hatred and threats directed against “our movement” are so severe, said several other J Street speakers, that it takes extraordinary personal courage to espouse the “pro-peace, pro-Israel” perspective and to fight for the only rational solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict — an independent Palestinian state next to a Jewish state.
It’s bad enough that attending J Street’s conference meant listening to speakers like Peter Beinart laying all the blame for the lack of Middle East peace on the Israeli government and its AIPAC enablers. Far worse on the scale of idiocy was to hear Jeremy Ben-Ami introducing Beinart as a J Street “hero” and a public intellectual of great personal courage. Ben-Ami’s father exhibited true courage when he stood up to Rabbi Wise in the 1940s and championed the lost cause of the European Jews. On the other hand, it is truly an Orwellian moment when Ben Ami anoints Peter Beinart as courageous for writing an article for the New York Review of Books (which Beinart followed up on by bagging a six figure book advance and lucrative Passover speaking engagements at Jewish resorts). It became all the more grotesque when Beinart, in his J Street speech, cited Rabbi Wise as his own liberal Zionist hero.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Irgun, J Street, Jeremy Ben Ami, Peter Beinart, Peter Bregson, Yitzchak Ben Ami
Rafael Medoff publishes a fascinating interview with Professor Ben Zion Netanyahu z"l in which the Prime Minister's late father discusses his activities in the US in the 1940's on behalf of European Jewry. 
