Jewish Organisations’ Response to Communism and to Senator McCarthy (review)

Do the math: Only a tiny minority of American Jews ever belonged to the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA). But they were disproportionately implicated in the Communist movement, from its feral origins to its sputtering end. In the 1950s such conspicuous involvement posed a serious problem for the Jewish defense agencies and other communal organizations. They were eager to brandish the patriotism of a minority that so often had been accused of divided loyalty. At a time when the threat from the Soviet Union and its cadres inside the United States seemed to threaten the very existence of the republic, the temptation to emphasize the full participation of American Jews in the national struggle against Communism must have been close to irresistible. Their historical experience had taught them, however, the value of constitutional rights as a protection against the fanaticism of majorities and had made Jews especially sensitive to violations of civil liberties.

Aviva Weingarten’s monograph, which was initially a dissertation at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, is the first book to calibrate the political dilemma that representative Jewish organizations faced in the first phase of the Cold War. Pro-McCarthyite groupuscules such as Rabbi Benjamin Schultz’s American Jewish League Against Communism were formed. But the evidence is overwhelming that Jewish organizations sought to reconcile an unambiguous anti-Communism with a preference for weapons that were antithetical to the modus operandi of the junior senator from Wisconsin. An overture from the American Legion to join forces against the menace of subversion was spurned, for example. By examining the archives of Jewish agencies as well as published sources on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, Weingarten conclusively shows how distant the Jewish community and its spokesmen were from a senator who, as late as January 1954, enjoyed the approval of half of the citizenry.

In buttressing her argument, Weingarten presents several episodes, including one involving Roy Cohn (though she fails to date it). Cohn, who had helped to prosecute and convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, tried to join the national board of directors of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of the B’nai B’rith. Backing him up was Judge Irving Kaufman, who had presided over the trial of the Rosenbergs. But because Cohn bore such visible responsibility for McCarthyism, the ADL regarded him as damaged goods and warned him that, were a formal vote taken, the board of directors would unanimously reject his candidacy. The two other major defense agencies, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the American Jewish Congress, were as forthright in their opposition to Cohn’s boss and instead promoted the alternative of liberal anti-Communism.

The emphatic communal repudiation of McCarthyism is even more striking because the eponymous senator was no anti-Semite. Jews such as Anna Rosenberg, whom the Truman administration named an assistant secretary of defense, and Irving Peress, an Army dentist who took the Fifth Amendment and was given an honorable discharge, found themselves within McCarthy’s crosshairs. But he never tapped the vein of anti-Semitism that was waiting to be mobilized among his supporters, and thus he differed from earlier right-wing demagogues who had stirred up religious or racial bigotry. That this incarnation of political conformism was remarkably bereft of any hostility to Jews struck observers as early as Richard H. Rovere, yet Weingarten makes the same argument (repetitively), as though no one before her had advanced it.

Despite the brevity of this book, its text is padded, as is its bibliography, which lists books that bear little if any relation to the author’s major themes. Nor can an obligation be shirked to report how disgraceful is the proofreading for this volume, which has been translated from the Hebrew. The staff director of McCarthy’s subcommittee, J. B. Matthews, is identified as “G. B. Matheus” (p. 130). The name of Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr., labeled the “US ambassador to the United States” (the United Nations...