The New Deal reconsidered: The Holocaust crisis

Another important corrective to the hazy nostalgia in which the FDR years were later enveloped is a look at the reaction, or failure of reaction, of the US to the Holocaust. As David Wyman recounts in his essential book on the subject, the nature and scope of the genocide were known in the US by late 1942. For fear of appearing "pro-Jewish," the War and State Departments, respectively, refused and blocked any action to stop it. Until his death, FDR was indifferent to both the genocide itself and the refugees in flight from it. The State Department, under the influence of the British Foreign Office, was also hostile to Zionism and declined to press for Jewish refugees to be allowed into Palestine. The contrast with Churchill is striking. Once he knew of it, he spoke publicly about the genocide and devised schemes for getting weapons to resistance movements in continental Europe. His complaint about Anglo-Jewry was its timidity and lack of organization. In spite of his courageous and public statements and actions in connection with the Holocaust, there were sharp limits on how far he push the rest of the British government on the issue. But there was no question where he stood.

It wasn't supposed to turn out that way. FDR's presidency, and especially his landslide victory in 1936, cemented the love affair of American Jews with the Democratic party. There have been periods of erosion of that affair (Eisenhower in 1956, Nixon in 1972, and Reagan in 1984, all received close to half of the American Jewish vote), but never a real prospect of dissolution. Although anti-discrimination laws before the late 1950s were more limited in scope, applying only to government, the influence of the New Deal's public hiring practices, and later their application through much of the US economy during the war, essentially started the modern civil rights era. The 1930s was not only the most isolationist decade in US history, it was the most nativist, a period of strong intergroup tensions and bigotry. The Depression itself, of course, was the largest single cause. But the message emanating from Germany also exerted a distinct influence. American Jews looked to FDR as "King of the Jews," the "good czar" who would protect them. American Jewish leaders like Rabbi Stephen Wise and Sam Rosenman acted as American versions of "court Jews" familiar from Europe.

And it was "court Jew" politics that failed in the war years. This influential establishment of lay and rabbinical leaders, allied with FDR, were determined to maintain the palace-intrigue approach to Jewish issues. Far from being a help, they seriously harmed Jewish self-interest in those years: for all their backroom dealings, they came up empty on antisemitism, Zionism, or rescuing European Jews.

Eventually, a new, more American type of "bottom-up" politics emerged in response to the Holocaust. Its emergence was too late for most of Europe's Jews. But it led to a stunning breakthrough for America's. After the end of the war, it became clear that, for all his greatness as a leader, FDR and his "court Jews" were the ultimate obstacles to progress on these issues. While he repeatedly used popular anti-semitism as an excuse for inaction, the circumstances of the war itself rapidly changed American opinion, and FDR was left behind by change he himself had helped to instigate. Treasury Secretary Morgenthau's plan to rescue Jewish refugees was largely drawn up by non-Jews. Former president Herbert Hoover, who first made his name leading war relief efforts during and after the First World War, offered to head up a refugee commission. It did form but failed to accomplish much, because of State Department and White House resistance. Even the State Department itself, once the war was over, relented enough to negotiate a settlement of refugee property claims with the Swiss government.*

A critical mass of Jewish groups finally gave up on palace intrigue, organizing and protesting publicly in 1943 and 1944, making Zionism and the rescue of Europe's remaining Jews broadly accepted, nonpartisan issues. By the 1944 election, both parties endorsed this platform, and within a few years, rapid political change led to dramatic changes in American acceptance of Jews and the start of the sharp decline in antisemitism that marked the postwar decades. This decisive change occurred in a space of a few years. Contrast with the 1940 election, where in spite of the bipartisan support for intervention in the war, America First and important isolationist leaders like Lindbergh made discreet but effective use of social prejudice against Jews to bolster their case. The America we live in now was made in those few short years by people (some of them returning from the war) who abandoned the 1930s politics of fear. Given FDR's opposition to Zionism and his stubborn refusal to do anything about the genocide in Europe, it's almost a miracle.**
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* Contrary to mythology pushed by the media in the 1990s, Switzerland had instituted the secret, numbered bank account system in the 1930s so that people fleeing Germany could move their assets to a safe place. It was generally less antisemitic than the rest of Europe and, in spite of the fact that much of its population was German-speaking, never fell for Hitler's Aryan vision. But most of the owners of the financial assets moved to Swiss banks perished, and several billions (in present dollars) were left unclaimed at the end of the war.

** Kenneth Levin's The Oslo Syndrome retraces Wyman's history in abbreviated form, then relates it to the return of Jewish self-ghettoization in the 1990s. Except that in a liberal democracy, self-ghettoization means self-defeat. "Court Jew" politics and palace intrigue don't work. While Clinton, unlike FDR, was not personally prejudiced against Jews, the political failure was similar, the Oslo "peace process" being the most damaging result.

The problem of Jewish self-hatred

- and we looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them.

- Numbers 13

Jewish self-hatred is a frequently talked about in hushed tones (like a disease that seems serious yet, at the same time, unreal) and often misunderstood as a social and historical reality. It's a distinctively modern phenomenon sometimes falsely attributed to earlier eras. Although there are recognizable forerunners among Jewish converts to Christianity and Islam (the converso-Inquisition episode and all its consequences - including Spinoza - provide some striking cases), as a full-blown affliction in its own right, it dates from no earlier than the post-Emancipation period in Europe (second quarter of the 19th century). By the early 20th century, there was a growing literature about it, mostly in German (juedische selbsthasse). To become widespread and distinctive, Jewish self-hatred needed a large number of Jews subject to double uprooting and double alienation, both from their origins as Jews but also from the larger gentile society around them. This double alienation creates a personality divided against itself and prone to self-hatred. Humans naturally seek to rationalize such feelings; in this case, the internalization of anti-semitic hate is a convenient solution ready at hand. Most striking is the comparison with other, parallel types of "self-image" pathologies, like the Stockholm and "battered wife" syndromes, and so on, in which people are driven to do irrational things plainly not in their self-interest by a similar division-of-the-self-against-itself. In the 1930s, Freud and other psychoanalysts lumped these phenomena under the heading, "identification with the aggressor." That concept forms a starting point for modern thinking on the subject.*

Taken to its logical conclusion, self-hatred can be regurgitated as a cosmic hatred. In its modern, political form, it takes form in fantasies of revolutionary apocalypse. It constitutes an essential part of the psychology of the modern left, and some of the most famous leftists of the last century and a half are simultaneously striking cases of self-hatred. Start with Marx, whose notorious On the Jewish Question is a classic of regurgitated self-hatred. Step down through the early 20th century to Trotsky; then to our own time, with Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and lesser lights. Nothing about these people and their thinking can be traced in a obvious way to the traditionally claimed source of trouble - poverty or economic class. The same holds for non-Jews exhibiting the same pattern; the details are different there, but the overall picture is similar. In an earlier posting, I mentioned George Soros, a leftist capitalist (an apparent oxymoron) who suffers from messianic delusions of grandeur - in parallel with, say, Jimmy Carter - but, who, unlike Carter, also suffers from clear and repeated signs of self-hatred. (Soros was born a Hungarian Jew and has developed a very peculiar relationship with his past.) The case of a wealthy leftist international currency trader looks odd, until you understand the self-hatred dynamic at work.

To penetrate the smokescreen of leftist rhetoric, listen to the music behind the text, not the text itself. You'll hear the passions at work, and they're not "nice": they include hate, anger, the desire for destruction and revenge. Much of the left is driven by these motives. Liberals pay too much attention to the text, get sucked in by the slogans ("peace," "justice"), and end up compromised with something they didn't expect. They pay insufficient attention to the music. Observe one striking fact: the alienated can be attracted to many things; seeking out and validating hatred directed at one's own society and self is only one possibility. But the self-hating latch on this hatred almost unerringly, of all possible things to latch on to.

After the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, Jewish self-hatred faded into the background - until recently. The revival of anti-semitism that started in Europe and the Middle East in the 1970s reached a new intensity in the late 90s and stimulated a new generation of self-hating Jews to step into politics. (Self-hating Jews rise and fall in prominence in parallel with the rise and fall of anti-semitism, another demonstration of the close connection between the two.) Certain crank figures (like Chomsky) were always there. This new, post-Marxist or "cultural" left gets more traction than it deserves because mainstream (liberal) Jewish organizations have made themselves vulnerable to its dynamic with their faulty self-definition, especially since the end of the Cold War. In many ways, they've painted themselves into a corner. There's a real problem here, one that I'll continue anlayzing in a later posting.
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* A lengthy exploration of Jewish self-hatred and self-delusion in this framework is Kenneth Levin's The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege. Scandanavian cities seem to be all over when we stare at this issue.