Hitler’s rise confronted Zionists with what felt like an endless series of wrenching decisions. The Jewish people were facing a catastrophe that dwarfed all those that had come before it. At the same time, the opportunity to create the first Jewish sovereign state since biblical times—one that built on the revival of the Hebrew language and an unprecedented commitment to the defense and uplift of the Jews—now felt achingly close to fruition. The problem was how to pursue that goal while at the same time doing whatever was possible to save their brethren in Europe. This meant undermining Great Britain in one arena and supporting it in another. The question divided Jews as few have before or since, but it ended with a near consensus: that while saving Jews from Hitler was likely impossible, the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine was attainable—and it would be the only way to defend Jews from future Hitlers, whatever form they might take. Zionist activist Nahum Goldmann expressed this near consensus with admirable economy: “Hitler has proved a Jewish homeland is necessary and the Jews in Palestine have proved that it is possible.”1
The old joke “Ask two Jews, get three opinions” spoke a truth that manifested itself on a nearly hourly basis among the ever-expanding list of ideological schisms that arose among the various groups within the Zionist movement of the early 1940s. Hadassah, the women’s Zionist organization that Henrietta Szold had founded in 1912, had grown into a fund-raising and organizational juggernaut, in part because it avoided politics and focused exclusively on service to the needy. Szold, still its leader, was dedicated to peaceful coexistence between Arabs and Jews and eager to find whatever kind of accommodation might be possible before even considering the possibility of statehood. She was also among the founders of Ihud, which was dedicated to this same vision. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) disagreed, arguing instead for the conquest of as much territory as possible and evincing almost no concern about whatever consequences this position might hold for the Arabs already living there. The Orthodox Religious Zionists of America (also known as Mizrachi), meanwhile, found themselves forced to deal with the socialists of Poale Zion of America (and vice versa), and both had to find a way to work with the socialist-Orthodox-Zionist Poale Mizrachi, which enjoyed support from both Orthodox garment workers in New York and religious kibbutzim in Palestine. That so many groups with competing agendas were able to reach agreement on anything at all and go on to assemble what may be the most impressive lobbying effort in the history of democratic politics would be impressive enough. But it would also turn out to be among the most significant contributions to the realization of what had, for millennia, appeared to be a fantastic, barely even imaginable goal: the creation of the first sovereign Jewish state in two millennia.
Rabbi Stephen Wise, formerly a trusted lieutenant to Louis Brandeis at the Zionist Organization of America, was an unabashed champion of the belief that social justice lay at the heart of American Jewish identity. Born in Budapest, he came to New York as a child and received a PhD from Columbia University before becoming a rabbi. A rare Zionist within the Reform rabbinate, Wise helped to found the American Jewish Congress in 1918 as an alternative to the elitist, non-Zionist orientation of the German Jews who led the American Jewish Committee, which had been founded in 1906. Among the first to organize marches, mass rallies, and boycotts against Hitler, beginning in 1933, Wise was also a founder, in 1936, of the World Jewish Congress, which sought to unite Jewish communal organizations worldwide in opposition to the Nazis. He was a consistent confidant of US officials as he desperately sought to inspire action to save Europe’s Jews. Both passionate about the Zionist cause and committed to Jewish unity, Wise frequently found himself juggling the demands of competing groups and ideologies. Moreover, as a friend and devotee of President Franklin Roosevelt, he was unwilling to distance himself too much from his president. His de facto position on almost everything therefore was compromise. On the Palestinian side, he allied himself with the storied British chemist and Zionist moderate Chaim Weizmann, whose devotion to the British ruling class mirrored Wise’s commitment to FDR and the Democrats.
Wise’s nemesis in the movement was Rabbi Abba Hillel Silver. Born in what was then Poland (now Lithuania), Silver grew up on New York’s Lower East Side and began agitating for the Zionist cause in 1907 at the age of fourteen. Although he remained a congregational Reform rabbi, “Jewish statehood and Hebrew culture,” in the words of one biographer, “were the highest values of his career.” Senior rabbi for forty-six years at Temple-Tifereth Israel in Cleveland, he was a spellbinding speaker. Like Wise, he was an early champion of labor rights, workers’ compensation, and civil liberties. Otherwise, he was Wise’s opposite. Silver was a lifelong Republican. He often exhibited a harsh demeanor, and he had a famously quick temper. And his views were maximalist in every respect: he allied with the militant David Ben-Gurion on matters concerning Palestine, in opposition to the moderate Weizmann/Wise wing of the Zionist movement. Silver promised at a 1935 ZOA convention to build an Israel that reached “beyond the Jordan, stretching north and stretching out on the shores of the Mediterranean.”2
Schisms formed within schisms among Zionists as the horrific news from Europe began to trickle into the United States in early 1942. The Reform movement was well into the process of jettisoning its commitment to Judaism as exclusively a religion, like Christianity, in favor of a new view of Jews as a religious community, like Irish or Italian Catholics. Such distinctions came to appear tragically irrelevant given Adolf Hitler’s strong feelings on the subject. Despite disagreements over the details, however, the imminent danger to Europe’s Jews, coupled with the refusal of any Western democracy to accept significant numbers of Jewish refugees—the United States had closed its doors to almost all immigration in 1924—led to a communal near consensus that mass emigration to Palestine was the Jews’ only hope.
Following on scattered stories in the Yiddish press, the first well-publicized (albeit unconfirmed) English-language report of the mass murder of Jews underway in Europe came from the exiled German novelist Thomas Mann. Mann relayed this news on BBC radio, with one of his reports being as early as November 1941, before Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on the United States. “The news sounds incredible, but my source is good,” he said in January 1942. “Four hundred young Dutch Jews have been brought to Germany to serve as objects for experimentation with poison gas.… They are dead; they have died for the New Order and the martial ingeniousness of the master race.” Mann’s report was largely ignored, though the New York Times printed a story titled “Extinction Feared by Jews of Poland” four months later, buried on page 28.3
The process of “knowing” and “doing” worked its way slowly through Jewish organizations and then through official US agencies, never with sufficient swiftness to save those living in the shadow of mass death. The amazing audacity of the Nazi killing machine exercised a near-hypnotic effect on virtually everyone who heard the news for the first time. Felix Frankfurter, Brandeis’s protégé (and successor on the Supreme Court), spoke for many American Jews and some gentiles when, upon hearing one such report from an escaped eyewitness, he lamented, “I did not say that he is lying. I said that I don’t believe him. There is a difference. My mind, my heart, they are made in such a way that I cannot conceive it. No, no, I do not have the strength to believe it.”4
As Hitler’s minions were murdering tens of thousands of Jews every day across Nazi-occupied or -controlled Europe, US officials refused to address the crisis. The State Department’s Division of European Affairs continued to suppress the news, owing to what it termed the “fantastic nature of the allegations.” Finally, on November 24, 1942, Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles summoned Wise to Washington in order to authorize him to release the horrific news of the ongoing murder of millions of European Jews. The confirmed number was already over two million. Even this information barely made a ripple in the US press. As late as December 1944, a majority of Americans, according to a Roper poll, still did not believe that the mass murder of European Jews was taking place.5
President Roosevelt, so beloved by American Jews, displayed little interest in saving those being slaughtered in Europe. He spoke with Jewish leaders about the topic just once, in a December 1942 meeting that lasted twenty-nine minutes. The president offered sympathetic words but promised no concrete action. And he took none, not even to ensure that the State Department met its minuscule quota for refugee admission. Officials in both the War and State Departments were almost unanimously opposed to anything that smacked of giving the Jews special treatment—whether in Europe, in Palestine, or before American refugee boards—irrespective of the special threats they faced. Roosevelt’s closest advisers, including the Jewish ones, thought it best to play down the significance of the Holocaust as well as the potential of a Jewish state as a cure for the age-old Jewish Question in Europe. All wished to avoid inspiring antisemites to condemn the war effort as being fought for “the Jews.”6
The ease with which American Jewish organizations came to embrace the Zionist cause in this crucial moment has since given rise to enormous controversy among historians over whether the intense focus on Palestine came at the expense of rescuing Jews from the Nazis. The reasons for the change in focus within American Jewry are easily understood if sometimes difficult to forgive. American Jews saw refugees as victims, a source of Jewish shame and a symbol of Jewish impotence. The Zionists, in contrast, made American Jewish breasts swell with pride. As the Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht explained in 1942, the Palestinian Jew had become a “champion… bringing a healthy and glamorous sound to that world-battered word ‘Jew.’”7
Among American Jews, the desperately difficult cause of “rescue” could not compete with the thrilling potential of the first Jewish state in nearly two millennia. The “rescue” issue did not even make the original agenda of the American Jewish Conference of 1943, and when it was belatedly added, it received little attention. Abba Hillel Silver cautioned his colleagues at the American Zionist Emergency Council, in May 1944, not to “overemphasize” the plight of the refugees, lest doing so enable opponents to say, “If it is rescue you are concerned about, why don’t you concentrate on that and put politics aside?” He worried it was “possible for the Diaspora to undermine the Jewish state.”8
The historian Aaron Berman has argued that the Zionists’ decision to give first priority to efforts in Palestine weakened the ability of American Jewish organizations to focus on the crisis in Europe: “Concentration on the statehood issue meant that few resources were left for the rescue campaign.” This may be true, but any other approach was unlikely in any case. Not only did few people know of the extent of the genocide underway, but it was (and remains) difficult to imagine how American Jews might have prevented or mitigated it. A public campaign in the United States was not going to sway Hitler and his allies, and the United States could hardly demand that other nations take in refugees while refusing to do so itself. Roosevelt and many Jewish leaders remained nervous about the potential for an explosion of antisemitism that might threaten both support for the war and the Jews themselves. No major Jewish organization proved willing to demand that more Jewish refugees be allowed into the United States, at least in a public campaign. With few exceptions, Jewish leaders were unwilling to challenge the president’s clearly delineated solution of saving Jews by simply winning the war. Nahum Goldmann again put a painful reality—as it was then understood—into succinct terms: “One half of the generation is being slaughtered before our eyes, and the other half has to sit down and cannot prevent this catastrophe.… Nothing can be done to check them; we can only work for victory.”9
Might it have been possible to save significantly larger numbers of Jews if that had been the sole focus of American Jewry’s efforts? A group calling itself the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe certainly thought so. Led by “Peter Bergson”—the pseudonym adopted by Hillel Kook, a hardline acolyte of the Revisionist Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and energetically aided by Ben Hecht, this group sought to ignite a campaign that would simply save Jews, without reference to the future of Palestine. It succeeded in pulling off star-studded galas in 1943 in six cities. With the motto “We Will Never Die,” they featured several Hollywood stars, including Marlon Brando, Paul Muni, and Edward G. Robinson, with original music composed by Kurt Weill. The Bergson group proposed to create emergency refugee shelters in Palestine for Jews who managed to escape from the periphery of Hitler’s rule, such as from Hungary, Romania, or Bulgaria.
Mainstream Zionist organizations did everything in their power to discredit these efforts and the people behind them. Rabbi Silver insisted that “Zionism is not a refugee movement.” Stephen Wise testified before Congress that the Bergson group was not a responsible part of the American Jewish community. During the height of the Holocaust, the American Zionist Emergency Committee, the movement’s main political arm, went so far as to make plans to oppose a congressional resolution calling on Britain to ease restrictions on Jewish entry into Palestine, because it did not include a commitment to Jewish sovereignty. To explain these remarkable maneuvers, historian Michael N. Barnett lays responsibility on the various interlocking, albeit unspoken, forms of guilt torturing American Jews as they learned the facts of the Shoah. They suffered “survivor’s guilt” together with “guilt that they had never fully grasped what was happening in Europe until it was too late.” Add to this the guilt that they “had never found the right words, or tried harder, to convince their relatives to flee while it was still possible,” and “were still not doing enough for the survivors.” And finally, “there was guilt that, once again, they were living comfortable lives in America while Jews were fighting and dying an ocean away.” Compared to the images of “emaciated bodies being bulldozed into nameless pits,” the Zionists’ counter-image of brave men and women fighting for “Jewish independence,” Barnett noted, “became a moment of expiation and redemption.” And so the wholehearted embrace of Zionism became, for most American Jews, the only option they could imagine.10
As tensions increased in Palestine, the specter of the Shoah had another, less frequently discussed effect on Zionist debates in the United States: it inspired a remarkably indulgent attitude toward Jewish terrorists. This was rarely acknowledged in public. Ben Hecht was now acting as de facto press secretary for the Irgun Tvai Leumi (National Military Organization, more commonly known as the Irgun), which was led by future Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin. Its more radical offshoot, Lohamei Herut Yisrael (Fighters for the Freedom of Israel, more commonly known as Lehi, or the Stern Gang), was led by another future prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir. Hecht placed a series of newspaper advertisements in May 1947 celebrating the Irgun’s murder of British officials and soldiers in Palestine, declaring, “Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail or send a British railroad train sky high or rob a British bank… the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.” He called the turn toward terrorism “the sanest and healthiest thing that has happened to the battered Hebrew cause in 1500 years.”11
Mainstream Zionist organizations issued statements of stern disapproval. The primary complaint, however, was that the expression of pro-terrorist sentiments “confused the public,” as Nahum Goldmann put it, as spokesman for the Jewish Agency. Worried that news of these terrorist attacks would turn the US public and Congress against the Zionists, the American Jewish Committee softened its position opposing Jewish statehood. In a confidential staff memo, AJC staff researcher Milton Himmelfarb expressed the hope that “after the state was created, the daily papers in New York at least would no longer carry headlines screaming of King David Hotel explosions and hangings of British sergeants; in short, ‘better an evil end than an endless evil.’”12
The question of the morality of the Jewish terrorists and their willingness to murder civilians in order to intimidate their adversaries, both British and Arab, rarely arose in American Zionist circles. The implication—sometimes voiced, sometimes implicit—was that after the horrors inflicted on the Jews by the Nazis, and the refusal of the rest of the world to take much notice, such scruples were a luxury Jews could no longer afford. What’s more, it seemed to work. Bruce Hoffmann, author of a comprehensive history of the topic, described the Jewish terrorist campaign as “the first post–World War II ‘war of national liberation’” and credited its success with hastening the British government’s ultimate decision to end its mandate and withdraw its troops, thereby paving the way for the Zionist victory.13
Not all American Jews were eager to hop aboard the Zionist express. The most vociferous voice of the movement’s Jewish opponents undoubtedly belonged to Elmer Berger, a prominent Reform rabbi in Flint, Michigan. Funded by some of the great fortunes of American Jewry, including Lessing Rosenwald, son of Sears, Roebuck magnate and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, Berger organized anti-Zionist Jews into the American Council for Judaism (ACJ) in 1942. ACJ literature deplored “the racist theories and nationalist philosophies that have become prevalent in recent years,” by which Berger meant not only fascism, but also Zionism. The literature attacked what it called the “Hitlerian concept of a Jewish state.” The ACJ’s members “look[ed] forward to the ultimate establishment of a democratic, autonomous government in Palestine,” with Jews, Muslims, and Christians “enjoying equal rights and sharing equal responsibilities”: “Our fellow Jews shall be free Palestinians whose religion is Judaism, even as we are Americans whose religion is Judaism.” While the group’s membership was small and geographically concentrated, and even in those places remained a minority, it continually punched well above its weight politically. In part this was due to the fact that its views were very much appreciated within the US national security establishment, and especially the State Department. Only slightly less significantly, the ACJ also enjoyed the enthusiastic support of the Sulzberger family’s newspaper, the New York Times.14
Although Times publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger never formally joined Berger’s organization, his newspaper continued to treat the group as a serious political and ideological force long after this might have been journalistically defensible. He forbade use of the phrase “the Jewish people” in the paper, preferring unwieldy substitutes such as “people of the Jewish faith”; later he vetoed all use of the term “the Jewish state.” Following in the footsteps of Adolph Ochs, his father-in-law and predecessor in the publisher’s chair, who, perhaps ironically, was married to the daughter of the famed Reform rabbi Isaac Meyer Wise, Sulzberger consistently resisted putting Jews in “showcase” editorial positions at the Times regardless of their qualifications. He urged his fellow prominent German Jews to follow a similar practice in the businesses they oversaw. In 1938, he tried to convince Franklin Roosevelt not to nominate Felix Frankfurter to succeed Benjamin Cardozo on the US Supreme Court, lest the appearance of a “Jewish seat” on the court provoke an antisemitic backlash. Sulzberger’s anti-Zionism became so extreme that he complained in a 1946 speech that “thousands dead might now be alive” had the Zionists put “less emphasis on statehood.” This concern for the fate of Jewish victims of Nazism, however, is invisible in the Times’ coverage of the issue, which consistently downplayed the danger to Europe’s Jews, buried stories about the Shoah, and, in short, ensured that America’s “paper of record” made no attempt whatsoever to do justice to the historic crimes then underway.15
A more significant obstacle to the Zionist conquest of mainstream American Jewish institutions than the uncompromising anti-Zionism of the ACJ were the more measured concerns expressed by the non-Zionists who led the American Jewish Committee (AJC). These were some of the wealthiest and most admired Jews in America. The AJC operated as a self-appointed executive committee for (mostly) German American Jewry, protecting both its interests and its image as it committed itself to the kinds of good works that its members understood to serve both goals simultaneously. Initially spearheaded by the lawyer Louis Marshall (Judah Magnes’s father-in-law), together with the banker Jacob Schiff and the scholar Cyrus Adler, it was formed in 1906 at least in part to address the crises faced by Russian Jews (both those seeking to emigrate to the United States and those who had already arrived). The help, while crucial to the remarkable success of the immigrants in rising through American society, came with a mixture of ambivalence and condescension. The German Jews’ fear was that these unclean, unkempt masses would discredit all Jews in the eyes of Protestant America. The sheer numbers of the Russians—an immigrant wave that would eventually reach more than two million before it was shut down by Congress’s restrictive Immigration Act of 1924—meant, moreover, that they would soon overwhelm the comfortable, authoritative position of the 250,000 or so German Jews who had previously defined the community. With the countless philanthropic institutions they formed, the Germans sowed the seeds of their eventual displacement by the very people they believed themselves to be rescuing.
Constantly worried about the possibility of an explosion of antisemitism, AJC members remained wary of Zionism and its implications for Jewish peoplehood as well as its potential for dividing Jewish loyalties. And while AJC’s position was simpatico with that of President Roosevelt and the US State Department, it was not one shared by most East European Jews. The latter were growing increasingly dedicated to Zionism as news of the horrors of the Holocaust traveled through family and village networks. No doubt concerned about the increasing political distance between his organization’s orientation and that of the Jewish masses in whose name it purported to speak, Joseph M. Proskauer, a lawyer and former New York Supreme Court judge, who became head of the AJC in 1943, scrambled to try to bridge the gap. He had a partner in the Zionist stalwart Stephen Wise, who shared his commitment to both FDR and at least a pretense of Jewish unity. While insisting “on principle” to be “unalterably opposed to any plan that would seem to set up the Jews as a separate political enclave,” Proskauer proposed a “conference” of Jewish groups in the hopes of moderating Zionist demands and retaining the AJC’s position as first among equals in Jewish organizations.16
A previous meeting, held at New York’s Biltmore Hotel in May 1942, with 600 delegates and Zionist leaders from 18 countries attending, had demonstrated the dominance of one view in particular. Those demanding the creation of a Jewish “commonwealth” among Zionist leaders, together with a shift of its political focus from the United Kingdom to the United States, had prevailed. Now, on August 29, 1943, 504 representatives of 65 national Jewish organizations and institutions, claiming to represent fully 1.5 million American Jews, gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan. Because of its deliberately limited membership, the AJC was granted only three delegates. The Zionists, meanwhile, had secured the votes of over 80 percent of the delegates in advance.
As the proceedings began, moderate Zionist leaders, led by Wise, sought to work out a compromise with Proskauer in the hopes of preserving Jewish unity. When the AJC leader agreed to drop his organization’s blanket condemnation of the idea of a Jewish state, merely terming its proposed creation “untimely,” Wise was willing to make a deal. Abba Hillel Silver, however, was not. Grabbing the podium via a complicated parliamentary maneuver, he denounced the compromise even before Wise had finished proposing it. Rising to spellbinding oratorical heights, Silver thrilled his audience by asking, “How long is this crucifixion of Israel to last?” “From the infected typhus-ridden ghetto of Warsaw, from the death block of Nazi-occupied lands where myriads of our people are awaiting execution,” he thundered, “from a hundred concentration camps which befoul the map of Europe, from the pitiful bands of our wandering ghosts over the entire face of the earth comes the cry: Enough!” When he concluded that “there is but one solution for national homelessness. That is a national home!” the room burst into a spontaneous rendition of “Hatikvah,” the Zionist national anthem. All serious talk of compromise ended then and there. Among organizations represented at the conference, only the AJC voted against the creation of a Jewish commonwealth (before its delegates walked out). Silver had effectively elbowed the aging Wise from his position as the de facto leader of the American Zionist movement, and his program soon became the all-but-unchallenged program of mainstream American Jewish organizations and the millions of Jews they could fairly be said to represent.17
Its embrace of Zionism transformed the American Jewish community, providing both a common cause and sense of purpose. It served simultaneously to unite and democratize the community. It blunted the oversized influence of Jewish wealth and power as previously exercised by the AJC and uplifted the East Europeans to equal and ultimately dominant status. Simultaneously, it united Conservative, Orthodox, and Reform Jews as never before. In doing so, moreover, it helped to bring back into the fold many “who otherwise would have been lost to Judaism,” as the seminal theologian of Conservative Judaism, Solomon Schechter, had predicted it would back in 1906. For a growing number of Jews, the tenets and rules of the religion itself were losing their appeal, but commitment to the cause of what became known in the wake of the Holocaust as Jewish “peoplehood”—essentially ethnic solidarity—rose accordingly.18
Almost irrespective of whatever religious or theological beliefs they held, this sense of community revived a feeling of pride among American Jews and affirmed their commitment to Jewish identity. At one meeting of the Jewish National Fund, an organization founded in 1903 to purchase land in Palestine in order to settle Jews there—a young rabbi asserted, without challenge or protest, “I was born in Palestine; the Jews of Palestine have status and dignity; the Jews of the Galut [exile] have no status and no dignity.” Such sentiments were common among American Jews as they learned of the tragedy in Europe. They experienced a profound sense of helplessness in its wake, which helped to fuel the Zionists’ success within the community. But winning over American Jews was one battle; convincing the US government to support the Zionist agenda in the face of powerful opponents inside and outside the country was a task of an entirely different order.19