Much talk, little action
American Jews and the Holocaust: Part 4
This is part 4 of an ongoing series. Read part 1, part 2, and part 3.
American Jews back home, who had not gone to war where they would have had to confront their European brethren directly, tended not to engage with the harsh reality of the Holocaust. They would do, say, or write what they could to show their support for their suffering brethren; but beyond that, comfortable in the United States, there was not much more action.
The persecuted European Jews facing their own mortality intuited this American attitude and even mocked it. Szmul Zygielbojm, a member of the Polish Government-in-Exile who considered making an appeal to American Jewish leaders for assistance to the Warsaw ghetto uprising, was assured by the ghetto fighters, “Jewish leaders abroad won’t be interested. At eleven in the morning you will begin telling them about the anguish of the Jews in Poland, but at 1 P.M. they will ask you to halt the narrative so they can have lunch. That is a difference which cannot be bridged. They will go on lunching at their favorite restaurant. So they cannot understand what is happening in Poland.” From the perspective of the European Jews, who were suffering and dying in mass numbers, their American counterparts lacked the urgency, or perhaps the will, to produce much concrete action toward the benefit or rescue of the European Jews.
American Jewish journalists exhibited the same feeling toward their fellows. As a terrible crisis engulfed Hungarian Jewry and many more Jews were threatened with immediate deportation or murder, Y. Fishman wrote in the Morning Journal: “In the past, when such news came here, there was a flurry of meetings and protests…But now people are passive; there are dinners and banquets and many expressions of thanks to the [War Refugee Board] and to individuals who save Jews…” As Fishman saw it, American Jews were too comfortable and complacent; while in the past they might have been energized to organize and advocate aiding the European Jews, by 1944 they had lost their steam. Haskel Lookstein offers an interpretation of these attitudes: “Overcome by the pain of their brothers and sisters, frustrated over their lack of power to effect a change in Washington, and frightened by the relentless and efficient process of annihilation, they chose to deny, minimize, or ignore the terrible news that was before their eyes.”
The Holocaust was then and remains today an incomprehensible and excruciatingly painful issue to confront. Even after decades, it’s impossible to make sense of the Shoah, the attempted destruction of European Jewry. American Jews of the time didn’t know how to contend with it; rather than confront the feelings of loss, guilt, and pain that the Holocaust would necessarily provoke, many chose simply not to deal with it.
In his final analysis of the American Jewish community’s response (or lack thereof) to the Holocaust, Lookstein concludes that the “Final Solution may have been unstoppable by American Jewry, but it should have been unbearable for them. And it wasn’t. This is important, not alone for our understanding of the past, but for our sense of responsibility in the future.” As he sees it, American Jews couldn’t have done much more, if anything, to stop the Holocaust and to save their European brethren. He doesn’t condemn their lack of effective action, for he doesn’t believe it would have been possible to do more; rather, he laments American Jews’ relatively easy capacity to go on with their lives as normal in the shadow of the Holocaust. They had seen the great evil of the twentieth century and the near destruction of their people in Europe; they still went on with their lives. They were still able to forget that incomprehensible evil enough to find happiness and fulfillment.
This is not to judge American Jews of the time; rather, it is to try to understand why they reacted the way they did, and how it affected postwar relations between them and the European Holocaust survivors who immigrated to the United States. It came down to American Jews’ relative comfort and security in their identities as Americans: they didn’t fully understand the Holocaust, and they couldn’t understand what it meant to have been a European Jew in the twentieth century. This was an unbridgeable gap: American Jews couldn’t seem to look past their own identities as Americans to fully understand the European survivors who settled in the United States.
This is part 4 of a series. Stay tuned for the next installment.