The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (review)

The Jewish Quarterly Review, XCII, Nos. 3-4 (January-April, 2002) 569-575 Benjamin Ginsberg. The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998 [1993]. Pp. xii + 286. Paperback $13.00. First time readers will come to Ginsberg's discussion of Jews and politics because of its arresting title—The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State. Ginsberg seconds Hannah Arendt's (1966) well-known proposition that the relationship between Jews and political power has been the principal trigger for organized antisemitism, therefore, the title, The Fatal Embrace. Ginsberg states his primary thesis thus: "The question with which this book is concerned, however, is not so much the roots of anti-Jewish sentiment as the conditions under which such sentiment is likely to be politically mobilized " (p. 8). Ginsberg, true to his word, does not provide an extensive history of antisemitism so much as he attempts to show the ways in which antisemitism has been used as a political weapon to defeat or take over the established order (p. 10). Ginsberg contends that for decades America's Jews (as was the case with their European counterparts) have been protected and enriched by their political alliances with the state (which they frequently helped build), but that they were also expendable when the reigning order believed itself secure in office and no longer in need of the Jews. Therefore , according to Ginsberg, Jews are and continue to be an expendable political commodity, and anti-Jewish attacks and rhetoric are permanent social artifacts that can be used repeatedly to upset the current political reign. An accomplished writer and political historian, Ginsberg treats the reader to an informative history of European Jews, politics, and antisemitism that ranges over 900 years. I found his discussion of French antisemitism particularly satisfying. His main focus, however, is on Jews, politics, and antisemitism in America from the Civil War period to the early 1990s. In the early years of the 20th century, Eastern European Jews poured into America in huge numbers, and with them came increasing incidents of anti-Jewish behavior. The Jews who had arrived earlier in the 19th century (the Sephardic and German Jews) were already comfortably settled, economically successful, and deeply involved in the American political scene when the new Jewish immigrants arrived by the millions. These well-settled Jews differed in a number of ways from the later immigrants. Significantly, they had encountered very little anti-Jewish animus during the time they had been in the U.S. There were some notable exceptions, such as Grant's Civil War Order #11, which attempted to expel all Jewish traders from the war zone. President Lincoln rescinded it almost as soon as Grant signed the order. Then 570THE JEWISH QUARTERLY REVIEW there was the well-known refusal on the part of a posh resort in Saratoga Springs, New York, to admit Joseph Seligman and his family in 1877. But America remained remarkably free of anti-Jewish sentiment until the late 19th and early 20th century. In the late teens and early 1920s, antisemitism began to increase noticeably , in no small part because of the efforts of the Immigration Restriction League, America's Nativist Movement, and the warped concepts of the pseudo-science of eugenics. By 1921, it was the U.S. government versus the Jews of Eastern Europe, as well as immigrants from other parts of Southern and Eastern Europe. The Jews had only themselves and their young advocacy organizations (the American Jewish Committee, the American Jewish Congress, and the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith) to defend them from wholesale exclusion. These organizations were unable to prevent the passage of the Johnson-Reed Immigration Restriction Act, signed in 1924, which limited the number of immigrants who could enter America, and particularly restricted the entry of Jews for decades to come. It is from the 1930s that Ginsberg provides his reader with the first in a series of carefully explained examples of the increasing participation of Jews in American government, and the antisemitism that was allegedly part and parcel of that involvement. The Roosevelt administration brought several Jews into its administration and into significant cabinet jobs. Some examples include the Secretary of...