Reluctant Ally: United States Foreign Policy Toward the Jews from Wilson to Roosevelt (review)

Book Reviews 129 and a clear understanding of the link between the Jewish way of life and non-naturalistic forms of theatrical expression. These many memories unfold like a great epic film, and though the transitions from one section to the next often show their seams, this is an unforgettable saga that breathes life into history. When we approach the final sections, it should be noted, the narrative seems to leave us a bit empty. Perhaps we're in denial, unwilling to accept the missing voice of Mr. Joseph Buloff, whose accounts are so filled with life that we don't want them to end. Thanks to the work of Ms. Kadison, we need only turn back the pages. Richard Stockton Rand Department of Visual and Performing Arts Purdue University Reluctant Ally: United States Foreign Policy Toward the Jews from Wilson to Roosevelt, by Frank W. Brecher. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1992. $47.95. Recent scholarship has not reflected kindly upon either American attitudes toward the Jewish struggle in Palestine or the American response to the Nazi persecution of Jews. Franklin Roosevelt, whose presidency spanned the entire Nazi era as well as most of the critical years of the Palestine conflict, emerges as a leader who never permitted humanitarian considerations to override the political advantages of ignoring both the Holocaust and the idea ofJewish statehood. Penetrating studies by Monty Penkower and David Wyman, as well as a host of related works by other scholars, have told the story in considerable detail.? To challenge such a formidable array of scholars is a daunting task, particularly for someone who is not an historian by training. Nonetheless, Mr. Frank Brecher, a veteran State Department officer, leaps into the fray with Reluctant Ally and comes down squarely on the side of FDR and the State Department. Of the four essays in this slim volume, two deal with Woodrow Wilson's Middle East policies, and a third surveys the career of Charles R. 9Monty Noam Penkower, The Jews Were E:vpendable: Free World Diplomacy and the Holocaust (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983); David S. Wyman, The Abandonment of theJews: America and the Holocaust 1941-45 (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 130 SHOFAR Summer 1994 Vol. 12, No.4 Crane, who briefly cochaired a post-World War I U.S. survey mission to the Mideast. Brecher's chapters on Wilson are interesting, if unexceptional. Because he relies so heavily on Wilson's published papers and on the Foreign Relations of the United States series (as opposed to unpublished documents), there are not many surprises here. Wilson's sympathy for Zionism is recounted, and the impact of his foreign policy on European Jewry is traced through his role in the Paris negotiations leading to the Minorities Treaties. Brecher has fresher material to offer on the rise and fall of the King-Crane Commission, which Wilson sent to the Mideast in 1919, and which returned with anti-Zionist recommendations that were never implemented. A subsequent chapter sheds some interesting light on Crane's activities in the years after the Commission, although Brecher fails to demonstrate that Crane had any real influence on U.S. policy. While claiming that Crane "exercised an important influence on the personal attitudes toward the Middle East of many leading Americans," Brecher names just one person who was actually influenced by Crane-Virginia Gildersleeve, the preSident of Barnard College, who was not exactly a major force in the shaping of American foreign policy. Brecher surveys the U.S. response to early Nazi atrocities, then suddenly digresses into a long discussion of U.S. policy towards the Vichy French administration in North Africa. Brecher's attempt to portray the Vichy episode as a microcosm ofAmerican policy towards European Jewry is not persuasive. Brecher wanders even further afield in the conclusion to his section on Vichy: "American policy [during the Holocaust] did reflect the country's natural humanitarian concern over the fate of the European Jews" since "there was no official interest in the U.S. government to see them destroyed." Such a broad definition of "humanitarian" might easily encompass an assortment of unpleasant individuals and regimes whose policies toward Jews in recent centuries fell short...