The Downfall of Abba Hillel Silver and the Foundation of Israel

5. The 1940s: The Holocaust as Political Leverage

80 5 The 1940s The Holocaust as Political Leverage The 1940s were Silver’s peak years as a Zionist leader. During this period he based his Zionist stance on an idealized hyphenated American-Jewish identity—one that affirmed the reciprocal relationship between Jewish solidarity and American patriotism. This stance was in tune with the unique challenges faced by American Jews of that era: America’s entry into World War II dictated a form of American patriotism from which any deviation was perceived as treacherous; at the same time, the Holocaust intensified an urgent sense of American-Jewish solidarity . Silver’s growing popularity among the American-Jewish public was rooted in his presumption to devise a reaction to the Holocaust that turned feelings of growing Jewish solidarity into legitimate and proud expressions of American patriotism. This is how one should understand the stance Silver took in leading the opposition to the American-Zionist leadership under Wise—a leadership perceived by many as hesitant to confront the Roosevelt administration and demand concrete action on behalf of European Jewry (Feingold 1995). Silver’s main allegation against Wise was that, by failing to challenge the administration, he had unwittingly promoted an approach that distinguished between so-called narrow Jewish interests and legitimate American interests. The troubling reports that began to arrive in late 1942 regarding the annihilation of European Jewry made this distinction an intolerable one, both to Silver and to large portions of American Jewry. The message that one risked conveying by failing to confront the government was that Jewish existential concerns, however Holocaust as Political Leverage | 81 urgent and fundamental, had no place within the framework of mainstream America. Silver’s public strength lay in his success at using Zionism as a means of transforming American-Jewish concerns into a determined demand on behalf of American-Jewish citizens for thoroughgoing rectification of Jewish marginality. This is exemplified in a speech delivered on May 2, 1943 at the National Conference for Palestine (Silver 1943a). In the speech, Silver linked Zionist demands with opposition to American policy in Algeria subsequent to the latter’s liberation from Vichy forces in November 1942; he protested the fact that the Vichy regime’s anti-Jewish laws continued to be upheld under American auspices.1 Silver connected American acquiescence in Algeria’s continued enforcement of discriminatory legislation with the American policy of evading the issue of a Jewish national home. In both cases, Silver felt, America had allied itself with the enemies of democracy and weakened those striving to ensure democracy’s ultimate triumph over Nazism. He cautioned that, should the United States maintain such policies, its war against the Nazis risked transformation into a mere power struggle. He maintained that only by conducting itself justly toward the Jewish people—a national group lacking any power and the one destined to emerge the most severely devastated by the war—could the United States pretend to be acting out of unselfish determination to safeguard democratic values as its primary objective in the war against Nazism. Silver’s address was delivered against the background of disillusionment and disappointment that prevailed among American Jews in the wake of the April 1943 Bermuda Conference. Despite previous hopes, no rescue plans were seriously discussed at the conference, and the American and British participants rejected all proposals that might involve diverting resources from the war effort.2 In contrast to Wise, who cautioned 1. Silver expressed fury that, even after American pressure had forced General André Giraud to annul the racial laws in November 1943, he continued to implement a policy of discrimination against Jews. 2. On the disappointment expressed in American Jewish public discourse regarding the results of the Bermuda Conference, see Gorny (2009, 161–62, 168–69). 82 | Silver’s Pre-State Zionist Career against any public statements that might cast Roosevelt in the light of an enemy of the Jewish people, Silver took the opposite line, decrying Roosevelt ’s empty condemnations of the Nazis and declaring him disloyal to his own stated cause of safeguarding justice and democracy (Silver 1943a). In order to grasp the real significance of Silver’s struggle against the conciliatory tactics practiced by the Zionist establishment under Wise, one must distinguish between the recriminations exchanged between the two and the tragic reality of American Jewry’s powerlessness. As the Bermuda Conference demonstrated, no camp, neither the more activist nor the more moderate, possessed the degree...