America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism (review)

The actions of American Jewish leaders during the Holocaust have been the subject of numerous scholarly inquiries since the 1970s. In these studies historians generally have characterized the American Jewish leadership during the 1930s and 1940s as timid in seeking assistance from the Roosevelt administration. Such tentativeness, they explain, reflected Jewish representatives' fear of jeopardizing relations with the White House, concern over domestic antisemitism, and desire to "fit in" as Americans.

While illuminating significant factors that shaped American Jewish leaders' response to the rise of Nazism, much of the scholarship published over the past three decades has also included a judgmental tinge. Several works criticize American Jews for not having done more or for adopting the wrong strategy on behalf of European Jewry. These assessments often ignore Jewish leaders' limited options for action at mid-century, conflating post-1960s American culture and Jewish politics with that of the mid-twentieth century.

Self-consciously avoiding these problems, Gulie Ne'eman Arad's America, Its Jews, and the Rise of Nazism is a scrupulously researched examination of American Jewish leaders' reactions to an unprecedented situation. Arad's study doggedly seeks to understand what it was like to be an American Jew in the 1930s and 1940s and how Jewish leaders viewed the plight of European Jewry. The book focuses on two types of leaders: the heads of major Jewish organizations who represented a fragmented and diverse Jewish community, and the "president's Jews" who were part of the Roosevelt administration. In seeking to understand these leaders' actions and decision-making, Arad addresses many of the same contextual issues raised by earlier works—the generally antisemitic climate of the time and a Jewish community which still felt the need to prove itself to the larger American society—but her rich detail and additional layers of analysis make this a critical and innovative contribution to the literature.

Arad centers her explanation of American Jewish behavior during the 1930s and 1940s around two main themes: American Jewry's historical memory (i.e. received wisdom) regarding how to defend Jewish interests abroad while at the same time preserving domestic political viability, and Jewish leaders' experience of Americanization. Regarding the former, Arad explores how historical consciousness of past crises informed the American Jewish leadership's reaction to the Holocaust. "The response of individuals and collectives to crisis situations is governed by pre-existing patterns," Arad writes, and the Jews were no exception (p. 103). To contextualize this argument, Arad devotes the first seventy pages of her book to American Jewish responses to earlier emergencies, such as the Damascus Affair of 1840 and the Kishinev pogroms of 1903 and 1905. American Jews learned "the 'dos and don'ts' of the American political culture" through these experiences, such as "Americanism as a national ideology did not look with favor upon acting on behalf of a particular group's interests" (pp. 1, 16). These lessons, Arad argues, later influenced American Jewish leaders' actions during the Nazi era.

The concept of historical memory informs Arad's argument in other ways. For example, she considers American Jewish leaders' recollections of Germany as the benchmark of culture and civility; this memory, she asserts, led them to view Hitler as an aberration not to be taken seriously. Other memories had origins preceding the American Jewish experience, such as the "historical lesson which held that Jewish survival depended on submission to the ruling authority" (p. 57). Arad also suggests that Jews' "traditional faith in the eternity of the Jewish people" - the notion that despite a history filled with enemies and catastrophes, the Jews have persisted - "may have also encouraged hazardous illusions" such as the Nazis too would pass and the Jews remain (p. 123).

Arad insists as well on placing Jewish leaders' reaction to Nazism in the context of their process of Americanization. American Jews' "need and desire to conform...