How Secure Are Jews In America?

Irving Kett

Haetzni

My friend Elyakim Haetzni, a former member of the Knesset recently wrote bemoaning the desertion of Israel on the part of many if not most American Jews. He said this, "Where are you in our hour of need? Don' t you know that if we sink, the ground beneath your feet will quake? Have you not yet learned that the very fact that Jews have their own country has buttressed your status in the Diaspora?"
American Jews, by and large, smugly and erroneously have themselves convinced that somehow they are different. That unlike the deluded Jews of the past who lived in Spain, or Poland, or Hungary, or Austria, or France, or Great Britain, or Germany, in America they have found the authentic "New Jerusalem". Unfortunately history has shown that wherever Jews have enjoyed freedom and a high level of success, there are forces working to undermine that favorable environment. The Jews of the United States have experienced periods of intense anti-Semitism. Remember that the Holocaust could never have taken place without the overt complicity of the United States and Great Britain. The latent anti-Semitism that has turned Europe into that simmering cauldron of Jew-hatred may very well be revisiting the United States. A recent ADL study concluded that 15% of Americans or about 35 million adults harbor strong anti-Semitic views. The survey found that 29% of foreign-born Hispanics harbor hard-core anti-Semitic beliefs, as do 1/3 of all Blacks, 31% of Americans believe that Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S. and 1/4 still blame Jews for the death of Jesus. All of these figures indicate a latent upward trend in animosity toward Jews.

Walt And Mearsheimer

Jonathan Pollard would not be imprisoned for the past 25 years if he were not a Jew nor would the two AIPAC officials be under indictment today. Twenty years ago Scribners would not have published the fraudulent book by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt accusing the Jews of controlling U.S. foreign policy for the benefit of Israel. Nor would former president Jimmy Carter have been free to spew his anti-Zionist venom. Today we are witnessing an ever growing hostility toward Israel in the Democratic Party, despite the 80% Jewish support that the party receives at the polls and the large financial support the Jews provide.

We tend to forget the history of anti-Semitism in the United States. Social discrimination against Jews became the norm in American society soon after the Civil War in 1865. When my grandparents landed in the U.S. from Europe in the 1880' s , they were confronted with signs at hotels and restaurants,'No Jews And Dogs Allowed.' By 1900 Jewish university students were barred from membership in fraternities and sororities. Jews found it increasingly difficult to obtain faculty positions. Certain professions such as engineering, medicine and the teaching of English literature were especially hostile to Jews.

By the 1920's quotas on Jewish students were commonplace in most of the prestigious colleges and universities. In Europe it was called Numerus Clausus. In the 1920's the immensely wealthy automobile manufacturer, Henry Ford, spent many millions of dollars popularizing the fraudulent anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion, which is a perennial best seller in the Arab world today. In 1924 the U.S. Congress passed the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act in order to restrict the number of Jews entering the United States, with disastrous consequences for the Jews trapped in Europe during the Nazi era.

Father Charles Coughlin

American anti-Semitism climbed to even higher levels in the 1930' s, in response to Hitler, and continued to do so during the period of 1940 to 1944. In the decade before Pearl Harbor, there were reputed to be over 100 active organizations spewing anti-Semitic hate propaganda throughout the U.S. As a teenager I remember listening to one of the leading purveyors of Jew-hatred on nationwide radio each week, a Catholic priest named Charles E. Coughlin from Royal Oak, MI. He had a following of many millions. I recall attacks on Jews in the Yorkville section of Manhattan in New York City by gangs from Fritz Kuhn' s German-American Bund. Some of these organizations were disbanded when the U.S. entered WWII after the attack on Pearl Harbor but other took their place under different guises. The hatred of Jews in this country promoted and nurtured during many years had devastating results at the time of the Holocaust. One of the reasons why American Jews maintained such a low profile during WWII, even when reports of mass extermination of their European brethren could no longer be doubted, was the actual fear of pogroms in the U.S. and of officially inspired anti-Semitism. Peter Bergson, a member of the Irgun and a nephew of the legendary Rav Kook, tried to arouse U.S. Jewry on behalf of European Jewry. I suggest you get hold of and read a fascinating book on this subject by the Hollywood playwright Ben Hecht called, Perfidy. The Jewish establishment as exemplified by Rabbi Stephen S. Wise were bitterly hostile to the Bergson effort.

During WWII I served as an ordinary infantry soldier in the U.S. Army. As a youngster born and raised in New York City, I was shocked at the extent and intensity of anti-Semitism that I was suddenly confronted with as a soldier.

Surveys published in the New York Times, Time and Mercury magazines pointed out that during the period starting with the summer of 1940 until the end of WWII, 15 to 24% of respondents to polls considered the Jews to be a menace to America. These and many other publications reported that Jews were considerd a greater threat to the security and welfare of the U.S. than the Japanese and the Germans with whom America was at war in a life and death struggle. In the halls of Congress attacks on Jews were so vicious that a Jewish congressman from New York, Michael Edelstein, in 1944, collapsed and died from a heart attack after hearing a Nazi-style diatribe from a Democratic Congressman named, John Rankin. Anti-Semitism climbed to a historic peak late in 1944 according to Elmo Roper, a leading pollster of that era. I call your attention to another important book, culled largely from U.S. State Department documents, The Abandonment Of The Jews, by an eminent historian, David S. Wyman, a scion of an old New England family.

Today there are at least 100 web sites on the internet devoted to hatred of Jews and of Israel. Most of this hatred is emanating from the so-called liberal and Marxist left, including self-hating Jews.

At places like Huffington.com and other web sites where the MoveOn.org crowd congregate, the comments range from the scatological to the blatantly anti-Semitic. We are entering a political environment in which hostility to Israel and the perceived Jewish influence on U.S. foreign policy is gaining widespread currency. Even such a bastion of Jewish liberalism as the Jewish Forward reluctantly had to conclude that the reaction to Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut when he ran as an Independent for Senator in Connecticut constituted far more "than the familiar tinge of bigotry in the Democratic Party that Jews have long become accustomed to and ignore." The Forward pointed out in its editorial that such anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering was unfortunately indicative of an alarming shift in American political culture which Jews have grown unaccustomed to for the past 60 years.

This does not mean that the entire Democratic Party has become completely subservient to the Jimmy Carters, the George Soroses, and the Michael Moores. But it is true that the anti-Israel and anti-Semitic forces are not an insignificant factor in one of our two leading political parties.

Except for a minority of Diaspora Jewry and our loyal supporters in the Christian fundamentalist community, most of whom are in the United States, we Jews have few friends in the world. American Jews have every reason to be ashamed that the only organized community in this country that recognizes and vigorously supports the historic right of the Jewish people in all of the Land of Israel are concentrated in the 40,000,000 evangelical Christians community. When evangelicals come to Israel, they go to Hebron, Kiryat Arba, Shilo and Beth El, places shunned by most American Jewish leaders.

Columnist (and evangelical Christian) Cal Thomas recently wrote concerning Israel's sequential concessions to its avowed mortal enemies, "It is particularly unpleasant when Jews are co-conspirators in their own destruction."

As one who for many years was a university professor (and who still teaches), I can personally attest to the hatred of Israel and Zionism being propagated on leading American and Canadian universities. Recall that at the time of the Weimar Republic, the Nazi Party in Germany was strong in the universities and indoctrinated their youth, before Hitler became a serious political factor in Germany. The same anti-Semitic syndrome is intensifying in Western universities.

I am not predicting that American Jewry is immanently in danger from the imposition of the Nurenberg Laws or that the U.S. foreign policy toward Israel is destined to become overtly hostile in the immediate future. We are, however, faced with worrying portents of change. I do believe that the Government of Israel should invest serious effort into planning the future of the Jewish State without U.S. military and diplomatic support. Do I believe that is possible? I do which is why my children and grandchildren are living in Israel. In fact severing the umbilical chord to the U. S . would result in a number of significant benefits for Israel as well as critical challenges .

Irving Kett led AFSI's California chapter for many years.