American as apple pie
American Jews and the Holocaust: Part 1
Note: This series is adapted from a senior thesis I wrote for Georgetown University’s Program for Jewish Civilization. It is dedicated to the memory of Rabbi Harold White (z”l), Georgetown’s longtime Jewish chaplain, whom I was privileged to consider a mentor and friend. It was Rabbi White who suggested that I study the relationship between American Jews and Holocaust survivors, a subject he felt didn’t get the attention it deserved.
While some of the sources quoted use the spelling “anti-Semitism,” in my own words I choose to write “antisemitism,” as recommended by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
The Holocaust was a defining, cataclysmic event for the Jewish world. Also known as the Shoah, Hebrew for “catastrophe,” it has cast a shadow upon Jewish life which hasn’t abated to this day. Monuments, academic studies, museums, and literature memorializing and exploring the Holocaust abound, and they all purport in some way to analyze and understand this genocide of six million.
From the rise of Nazi Germany in 1933, during the war years, and throughout the decades since, the American Jewish community has differed in its responses to the Holocaust, the attempted destruction of European Jewry. The question of whether American Jewry could have done more before and during the war to save their European brethren is a controversial one that is ultimately impossible to answer, and it is beyond my scope here. However, the behavior of the Jewish community of the United States during the Holocaust is helpful for understanding its treatment of European survivors after the war. Before, during, and after the war, American Jews as a community defined themselves as Americans first. They purposely and consciously identified themselves with the rest of America; they endeavored to convince their possibly antisemitic fellow Americans of Jewish loyalty to the United States. Jewish desire and effort to be distinctly American defined the variety of American-Jewish responses to the Holocaust during the war, and likewise the variety of behaviors toward Holocaust survivors after the war’s end.
Jews had lived in the United States as loyal citizens for hundreds of years. But during the first half of the twentieth century, within American society there was a powerful, ugly strain of xenophobia, nativism, and antisemitism. American Jews often felt that since they were not members of the Protestant majority, they had to compensate by proving their patriotism and loyalty. Through the years, but especially during the Great Depression and World War II, they emphasized that they were Americans above all else.
Haskel Lookstein, author of Were We Our Brothers’ Keepers?, which chronicles the American Jewish community’s responses to the Holocaust, provides a poignant example. Explaining that American Jews “were sufficiently insecure to feel that they had to be more patriotic than the most chauvinistic of American groups,” he relates how Stephen S. Wise, a prominent American Reform rabbi and friend of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s, addressed the American Jewish Conference in August of 1943. Though the conference took place during the height of the war in Europe and aimed to address the ongoing murder of European Jews, Rabbi Wise emphasized to those gathered: “This is an American Conference. We are Americans, first, last, and all the time. Nothing else that we are, whether by faith or race or fate, qualifies our Americanism. Everything else we are and have deepens, enriches and strengthens, if that can be, our Americanism.”
There were two sides to this constant, forceful emphasis on American identity and pride. On one hand, it assured non-Jews that Jewish citizens were just as American as they were; they had the same pride and patriotism, although they had a different religion. At a time of virulent antisemitism in the United States, emphasizing this fact was understandable and worthwhile. On the other hand, this insistence had a perhaps unintended aspect. While emphasizing their Americanism and their connection to their American brothers and sisters—their belonging to the New World—American Jews were distancing themselves from the Old World—Europe—and so consequently from their European Jewish brothers and sisters. After the war, this emphasis on Americanism would become a difficult barrier to understanding between American Jews and European Holocaust survivors. At this time, however, it solidified the Jewish community’s commitment and loyalty to the goals and destiny of the United States.
The Jewish community fervently desired acceptance into the American mainstream. Henry L. Feingold, author of Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust, is worth quoting at length on this subject. He questions “whether a Jewish community in the accepted sense—a group bound by common culture, language, experience, and religion—was still functioning during the interwar years. Historical forces associated with modernization and acculturation, which American Jewry experienced simultaneously and which were superimposed on a re-energized anti-Semitic movement, reshaped the consciousness of American Jewry.”
While antisemitism was a real and present threat, life in the United States offered opportunities and freedoms of which Jews had only dreamed in Europe, and with each new generation American Jews allowed themselves to feel more and more at home in their country. They shared in the American Dream as much as did any ethnic or religious community. Antisemitism “hardly put a crimp in the second generation’s drive to achieve middle-class status. More than anything else, it was that aspiration which marked Jewish life during the decade of the twenties. More energy and concern were expended on the private drive to achieve than on any public endeavor in Jewish American life.”
Gradually, as Jews achieved more and were denied less in the United States, they assimilated somewhat into the American mainstream. They could attain government civil service jobs; they could send their talented sons to Harvard, though antisemites tried to restrict their numbers there by instituting a Jewish admissions quota. Everywhere they could, Jews fought back against the antisemites who viewed them as enemies and aliens by asserting their own Americanism. Harry Starr, the undergraduate leader of the fight against Harvard’s proposed Jewish quota, insisted, “The Jew cannot look on himself as a problem.... Born or naturalized in this country, he is a full American.”
American Jews wouldn’t accept quotas without a fight because they knew they belonged in their country as much as any other American; equality as citizens before the law, full emancipation, and several generations’ worth of assimilation and acculturation in the United States gave young American Jews the confidence to assert that right.
This is part 1 of a series. Read part 2 here.