The Holocaust Averted: An Alternate History of American Jewry, 1938–1967 by Jeffrey S. Gurock (review)

Jeffrey S. Gurock, the Libby M. Klaperman professor of Jewish History at Yeshiva University, is unquestionably the leading authority on the history of Jewish Orthodoxy in the United States. In a series of books, including The Men and Women of Yeshiva: Higher Education, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (1988), American Jewish Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective (1996), A Modern Heretic and a Traditional Community: Mordecai M. Kaplan, Orthodoxy, and American Judaism (1997; Jacob J. Schacter coauthor), and Orthodox Jews in America (2009), he has deftly chronicled the often difficult and contentious but successful adaptation of the Orthodox laity and rabbinic leadership to a social and intellectual environment radically different from what they had known in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

In his new book Gurock has struck out in a different direction, writing an “alternate” history of 1938 to 1967 which assumes that Great Britain and France stood up to Germany in 1938 during the Munich crisis, Roosevelt never ran for a third and fourth term, the war in Europe ended with Hitler’s death and Germany’s defeat in 1944, and the Holocaust never occurred. Alternate history is the opposite of historical determinism, and it emphasizes the role of individuals rather than broad social and economic trends. It assumes that much of the past resulted from happenstance and that decision makers had the freedom to select from a variety of different policy options. Not surprisingly, alternate history has been more popular among political and military historians than among their social and economic counterparts. The former have wondered whether slavery would have persisted in the United States if the South had won the Civil War, whether World War I would have broken out had the procession of Archduke Franz Ferdinand taken a different route in Sarajevo, whether Germany would have become the dominant power in Europe if she had not invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941 or if the D-Day landings had been unsuccessful, whether the United States would have become so deeply involved in Vietnam if John F. Kennedy had not been assassinated in 1963, whether the politics of the Middle East would have been fundamentally different had Israel returned to its pre-1967 borders after the Six-Day War, and how different America’s Middle East policies would have been had Al Gore and not George W. Bush won the disputed 2000 presidential election.

Many historians are skeptical of those who stray from examining what actually happened into an imaginary realm of what could have happened, even though such speculations can shed light on the choices available to policymakers. The danger of alternate history is its potential for transforming historians into fabulists concocting improbable scenarios. Alternate historians are often driven by ulterior motives and to use history the same way a drunk uses a lamppost—for support rather than illumination. We would all like to believe that the catastrophes of the past could have been avoided, particularly World War II, the greatest catastrophe of all. But much of history has involved not problems for which there were answers but conditions for which there were no solutions. Conversely, there have been many attempts to show how things could have turned out even worse than they did. One such example is Bevin Alexander’s How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (2000).

The validity of any alternate history depends upon whether it is believable in view of the circumstances of the time. It is not helpful to propose an alternate history which, considering the actual political, economic, and social conditions, was beyond the realm of possibility. Such musings are ahistorical, and while they might make for interesting conversation, they do not contribute to our historical understanding. Thus a group of historians have attacked both Thomas Jefferson, a slave owner, for not calling for the end to slavery in the Declaration of Independence, and Abraham Lincoln for not...