American Jews' Cluelessness Stands the Test of Time

Today they're gaga for Obama, the Democratic who has repeatedly demonstrated that he is no friend of Israel. Back then, they were even more gung-ho for FDR, a haughty aristocrat who cared not a whit that Europe's Jews were being wiped out. Then, as now, it was a Republican who was the mensch, and who had the Jews' backs. This little known episode of history had been lost in the mists of time, but has now been dusted off in a scholarly work. City Journal's Harry Stein reviews it here. He writes:

By then [January 1942], news of mass exterminations of Jews had already leaked out, and FDR was facing pressure to do something about it. He was disinclined to act, because he regarded the matter as a distraction from the larger project of winning the war. To the extent he regarded the murder of Jews as a problem, he saw it as a political issue to be managed, lest it affect the outcome of the 1944 campaign. 

This is where Herbert Hoover comes in. No one ever described Hoover as haimish—Yiddish for down-to-earth, simpatico—let alone as a mensch. An Iowa-born Quaker, wealthy and self-made, he was stiff, formal, and bland, a living caricature of the sort Republican Jewish voters have long regarded with special scorn. But where their favorite Franklin Roosevelt, all jaunty bonhomie, brilliantly played at empathy, Hoover was a genuine humanitarian. Indeed, it was his remarkable record of saving millions of Europe’s destitute from starvation in the wake of the First World War that forged his political career. That career came crashing down, of course, with his failure as president to manage the Depression. But in the thirties and forties, from the political wilderness and in the face of isolationists in his own party, Hoover bravely took up the cause of Europe’s Jews. 

Returning from a visit to Germany and a meeting with Hitler in early 1938, Hoover denounced the Nazi state in the harshest possible terms, speaking out about concentration camps and the country’s “darkest picture . . . the heart-breaking persecution of helpless Jews.” Already he was pushing for the lifting of immigration restrictions favored by the Roosevelt administration, as later he would futilely urge decisive action to rescue those who still might have been saved. Moreover, along with such other leading Republicans as Wendell Willkie and Clare Boothe Luce, he embraced the cause of Jewish statehood, resulting in a pro-Zionist plank in the 1944 Republican platform. 

Meanwhile, with cover unfailingly provided by America’s most prominent Jewish spokesman—the American Jewish Congress’s Rabbi Stephen Wise, who referred to FDR as “The Chief” and “The All Highest”—Roosevelt did nothing. Only when the still-vibrant Jewish press began making an issue of the administration’s inaction in response to the tragedy of Europe’s Jews did Roosevelt, fearing a potential backlash at the polls, even make the gesture of getting a similar plank inserted into the Democratic platform. Not that he had any cause for concern: in 1944, 90 percent of Jewish voters went for FDR.