America, Its Jews and the Rise of Nazism: Not their brothers' keeper

Haaretz
Last update - 10:13 08/12/2006

Not their brothers' keeper

By Yitzhak Laor

"America, Its Jews and the Rise of Nazism" by Gulie Ne'eman Arad, Indiana University Press, 314 pages, $35

As the United States is becoming embroiled in a new Vietnam, and "American Jewry" is becoming a hot political topic, it is interesting to read Gulie Ne'eman Arad's book about that community in one of its ugliest hours: the Nazi regime's rise to power in Germany and the extermination of the Jews of Europe. Ne'eman Arad is careful not to judge the Jewish leadership in the United States because she is a historian and because she is a native-born Jewish Israeli, a sabra. And sabras, because of a Mapainik education, the education associated with the precursor of the Labor Party that dominated in Israel for many years, have usually learned to close their eyes to the ineffectualness known as 'dilemmas.' The Kastner trial will forever remain a testimony to the way in which the Jewish leadership was released from responsibility (and also judged) for co-optation (not to say collaboration).

This is a book full of facts, dates, names and summaries of studies, by a very scholarly person, about the way in which the entity called "American Jewry" dealt with the tremendous crises that were faced by the Jews of Europe from the end of the 19th century on their way to salvation in the United States, as a prologue to the great failure of the Jewish leadership in the United States in dealing with the extermination of the Jewish People in Europe. The historian from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev is aware of Hannah Arendt's harsh criticism of the Jewish leadership before the extermination. From time to time she prefers "psychological insights" to the description of political mechanisms that create these psychological insights.

Like Leo Baeck (whom Hannah Arendt discussed at length), Stephen Wise, a wealthy Jewish wheeler-dealer who led the Jewry of the United States during the time of the extermination, also earned respect in Israel. It is worth quoting from the diary of one victim, Mordechai Tenenbaum-Tamaroff, who wrote in Poland at the end of March, 1943, about someone called Aryeh (Ne'eman Arad believes that this is the poet Leibel Weinstein), who refused to give the writer of the diary poems that he had written. This is how the poet explained his refusal: "I do not want some Stephen Wise or some other Jew to cry after I am gone with crocodile tears; I do not wish to provide him with material for lectures."

It is too simple to dismiss all this with "don't judge your fellow." Arendt, too, did not discuss collaborators inside the ghettoes or the camps. She presented the legitimate, respected Jewish leadership, the leadership that found itself in collaboration, as the summation of a very long historical tradition of wanting to integrate, not to be saved - a tradition that in fact developed in the West, where Jews were not in danger. This is a desire to be part of the bourgeois elite, not to stand in opposition, not to be a "Yid" or a "Jewboy," "a Zhid" or a "Kike," but rather a good bourgeois and mingle in the salons of the cream of society in Berlin, Paris or Boston.

Waxing nostalgic
Now that the extermination of the Jews of Europe has become "blah-blah-blah" in every junior high school, it is worth asking whether the great honor that our leaders gave to the Jewish leaderships throughout the world, including Kastner, was not the understanding of those who were partners to the same behavior: "We need to exist forever; in any case we cannot help them; let us at least erect a memorial in their memory." This in effect is Ne'eman Arad's basic assumption in her description of the American Jewish failure to help the Jews of Europe.

The historical context that the writer examines is the growth of American Jewry into an economic force, well before what looks to us like the period of its empowerment: the years after World War II. The leftist sentiment of American Jews to wax nostalgic about the Jewish poverty in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side has of course some basis, but mainly this sentiment ignores the fact that a large portion of "our Jewish brethren" were an integral part of American capitalism right from the beginning of the 19th century. These were the German Jews who had immigrated to the United States and found what to this day we call, with a certain lack of clarity, "American Jewry."

Ne'eman Arad does not examine this concept and whether it has any cover beyond "the leadership," indeed beyond all kinds of leaderships, lobbies and wealthy businessmen who engage in philanthropy. She examines the way in which the first successful Jews put down roots well before the two world wars, hesitated whether to be Germans in America or to be Jews (40 percent of the whites in America today are of German origin, Protestant and later Catholic). In the end, Jews retained their identification with the religion (or whatever we call the sum total of customs that even thoroughly secular Jews observe). The decisions with regard to help for Jews knocking at the gates were not uniform, and to tell the truth what made the Jews of America so very influential were the open gates (at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century), and masses of Jews became "part of American Jewry."

When the gates to immigration closed, these gates also closed to the Jews who were fleeing Europe. The Jewish leadership in the United States did not do a lot to change this. The wretchedness of the leadership in considering whether to run to tell the president or to evade even overly extensive reporting in the newspapers (so as not to have to try to make a decision) is described extensively. Ne'eman Arad does not discuss an even more shocking closure of the gates: to the survivors, after the extermination. As is known, the United States took in more war criminals than victims.

The American Jews adapted themselves to the ethos of "not to stand out," not to reveal their power and, in effect, to reveal again and again that there is no economic power in a country that is not entirely dependent on the power of the state. The American Jews? strength did not stand them in good stead because, like any other capitalist power, it was dependent on the state in which it was active, and the state was not interested in Jews.

I presume that a number of economic journalists, disciples of "non-intervention of the state in the economy," will be surprised to discover this simple truth: There is no capitalist element that does not rely on the state's power and help. This is also true in the United States. The United States was indifferent to the fate of the Jews before the extermination, during the extermination and after it. The leadership of the Jews in the United States, in the best case, gritted its teeth. They did not even think of a public struggle. What was important was to continue to advance the standard of living.

Allied "discomfort"
Historian Raoul Hilberg has discussed extensively the matter of the Allies' "discomfort" in face of the slaughter of the Jews. He has written that basically they wanted to turn their backs on this development and did not want to deal with it. Later on, he says that at the beginning of 1944 a detailed report from Auschwitz, transmitted by the Polish underground, was distributed at the Office of Strategic Services, the War Ministry and the War Crimes Commission at the United Nations - and was buried by all three of them. Why? Hilberg says that the Western Allies did not want the war to be perceived by their populations as an effort to save the Jews. Not a hint or implication that the Allied soldiers are mercenaries in the Jewish issue. He notes that in any case it was quite difficult to explain to a Briton or to an American why they were fighting in Europe. Thus, it was in this atmosphere that the Jewish leadership found itself.

When the Polish underground succeeded in getting a detailed report on the extermination of the Polish Jews into the hands of its representatives in the United States and begged the American Jews to lobby Franklin D. Roosevelt, the president ultimately agreed to meet with the Jewish leadership. Ne'eman Arad describes this wretched meeting and does not spare the president. What Hilberg adds to the description is the condition that Roosevelt stipulated: Representatives of ultra-Orthodox Jewry in the United States would not come to the meeting. The Jewish leadership agreed, of course. This is where the huge problematics emerge when Jews come to writing the history of the Holocaust, as Moshe Zuckerman has said many times: how to describe Jews? attitude toward Jews on the ramp of Auschwitz. There is not only a class issue here ("Why are they putting us, good bourgeois that we are, together with the poor people?"). It is even more important, to continue the descriptions of Ne'eman Arad and Hilberg, to see the extent to which the attitude of many Jews was tainted by strong loathing for the "backward" Jews of Eastern Europe, the men with the beards and the women with the wigs - that is, the "non-moderns."

This is a very important context of modern anti-Semitism. It makes its appearance in Israeli culture, together with the loathing for the ultra-Orthodox, of course. It is obvious even in Ne'eman Arad's discussion of American Jewry, in the absence of the question, "Who is a Jew in the United States?" and in the absence of discussion of the American ultra-Orthodox and their attitude toward their brethren overseas. It is worth remembering: The ones with whom Roosevelt did not want to have his picture taken at the end of the meeting, and therefore asked that they not be brought, are the "images" that the Nazis used to start the process of the extermination.

It is not enough to rely on the Gershom Scholem's enthusiasm for the kabbala or Salman Schocken's for S.Y. Agnon. It is important to know the broader facts: The German Jews loathed the Ostjuden.

Here, at this juncture, it is worth remembering what the governor of New York, Herbert Lehman, wrote in 1933 when he recommended allowing German Jews to enter, even though the United States had already closed its gates, noting that he had met many who "have come over here in recent months and they have impressed me as very much the type of men like my father, Carl Schurz, and other Germans who came over here in the days of 1848 and who later were among our best citizens." In what Lehman wrote, the sentence handed down to the Jews of Europe can already be found.