The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during World War II (review)

The First to Cry Down Injustice? examines west-coast Jews’ response to the mass removal and imprisonment of western Japanese-descent populations during World War II. In her study of the relatively underexplored topic of western Jewish history, Ellen Eisenberg notes that, despite their growing vocal commitment to fighting persecution against minorities, most western Jews remained silent about the incarceration. In this regard they resembled their Jewish counterparts nationwide. They were different from American Jews elsewhere, not because their silence stemmed from apathy or ignorance—as Cheryl Greenberg has argued concerning the national Jewish population—but rather because western Jews’ silence was a conscious decision.¹ Their proximity to relatively large Japanese-descent populations and their exposure to long-term anti-Japanese propaganda and press coverage meant that Jews in California, Oregon, and Washington—particularly in the main urban areas where most Jews lived—could not ignore the issue.

Western urban Jews’ conscious silence partly reflected their sense of their own ethnoracial location, including growing insecurity about rising domestic and global antisemitism. They had enjoyed a history of relative inclusion compared to their national counterparts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The presence and exclusion of a significant population of more clearly nonwhite Latinos, Native Americans, and particularly Asians and Asian Americans helped create a relatively inclusive whiteness around them as well as other eastern and southern European-descent populations. Jews even participated in the anti-Asian movement, and some were members of anti-Asian organizations like the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, until the early twentieth century. This changed during the 1920s and 1930s as antisemitism mounted and spurred them to antidiscrimination defense work for themselves and other minorities. However, while their growing civil rights orientation generally silenced Jews’ previous public anti-Asian stance, the strength of the surrounding anti-Asian sentiment led Jewish community institutions generally to avoid commenting on Asians’ plight. Some individual Jews did, however, oppose the wartime internment.

Jews’ location in the ethnoracial hierarchy also helps explain the Los Angeles Jewish community’s secret involvement in orchestrating internment, an issue Eisenberg treats in a particularly revealing chapter. A longer history of exclusion made L.A.’s Jewish population more insecure than their western counterparts. Using underexplored archives from the city’s Jewish Community Committee (JCC, later the Community Relations Committee, then the Jewish Community Relations Council), Eisenberg shows how this fear led some members to share information on fascist and other “subversive” organizations with the press and authorities including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, House Un-American Activities Committee, and the Tenney Committee (the California Senate’s version of HUAC). Fascist and domestic racist organizations like the Silver Shirts, German American Bund, and Ku Klux Klan were the main targets, while Japanese and Japanese American organizations became a focus only after the German–Japanese alliance raised Jews’ concerns about their impact upon their own security. This information, publicized by an organization called the News Research Service, whose affiliation with the Jewish community remained hidden, contributed to the incarceration: California Attorney General Earl Warren, Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt—who wrote the 1943 Final Report on internment—and even the Supreme Court used this information to help shape policy. While L.A. Jews were influenced by long-term regional racist attitudes against Japanese-descent people, Eisenberg argues that fear of the growing fascist and antisemitic threat mainly motivated the JCC. In this way, Eisenberg explains what seems like a paradox: that L.A. Jewish Americans could support antidiscrimination efforts for themselves and most other minority groups at the same time that they helped orchestrate this discriminatory policy. Viewed in light of their primary wartime interest of fighting rising antisemitism and defeating Hitler, this seeming contradiction makes sense.

Whatever Jews’ motivation, Eisenberg’s discovery adds to historical understandings of the incarceration. More generally, by revealing Jews’ contributions to the policy...