by Jack Cooper
Brandeis was eventually confirmed and served on the court with distinction.
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1. David G. Dalin and Alfred J. Kolatch, The Presidents of the United States and the Jews (New York: Jonathan David, 2000), 136.
...Roosevelt’s opponents called the New Deal “the Jew Deal”
When Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, Jews were still facing significant discrimination in American life. Many elite universities had admission quotas for Jews and promotion to the highest business and government positions was often denied to Jews. Major law firms and law schools routinely declined to hire Jews.
However, by 1932 Roosevelt was being opposed by most of the nation’s Protestant elite and appointing them to high office seemed to be counterproductive. To fill the void, Roosevelt increasingly began to appoint Jews to positions in his administration.
One of Roosevelt’s key aides was Samuel Rosenman, who coined the name “New Deal” to describe Roosevelt’s program for economic recovery. Another key advisor to Roosevelt was Felix Frankfurter, later to become Roosevelt’s appointee to the United States Supreme Court. Frankfurter channeled many young Jewish lawyers into government service. They soon became known as “Frankfurter’s happy hot dogs.”
Benjamin Cohen, one of Frankfurter’s protégés, helped write key New Deal legislation. He coauthored the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, the Public Utility Holding Act of 1935, the Federal Communications Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority Act, and the Minimum Wage Act.
Supreme Court justice Louis Brandeis advised the administration how best to get the legislation past any challenges that would come before the courts. Henry Morgenthau Jr. became Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury. Isidor Lubin became head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and doubled as FDR’s chief economic advisor. Jerome Frank headed the Securities and Exchange Commission; David Lilienthal chaired the Tennessee Valley Authority, and the Housing Administration was headed by Nathan Straus.
Although Jews comprised only 3 percent of the nation’s population, they occupied 15 percent of Roosevelt’s appointed positions. It would seem that when Roosevelt’s anti-Semitic detractors derisively referred to the New Deal as the Jew Deal, they may have been close to the truth.1
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1. L. Sandy Maisel and Ira N. Forman, eds., Jews in American Politics (Lanham, MD: Row-man and Littlefield, 2001), 10–11.
...a kosher chicken killed part of Roosevelt’s New Deal
In an effort to ease the economic hardships brought on by the Great Depression, President Roosevelt proposed many pieces of legislation. Among these was the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA). Its purpose was to promote fair competition, create jobs for unemployed workers, support prices and competition, and stimulate the United States economy to recover from the depression gripping the country. Because the act was quite complicated and contained three thousand administrative orders running to over ten thousand pages,1 it was inevitable that a case involving the National Recovery Adminstration (NRA) would end up in the courts. One of the cases involved the Schechter Poultry Corp.2 The Schechter brothers had been brought into the New York circuit court to face sixty violations of the NRA code. This number was eventually brought down to eighteen, among them the sale of diseased chickens and the sale of uninspected chickens. The Schechters were convicted but promptly appealed to the United States Supreme Court.3
In a unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Schechters, declaring that the National Recovery Administration’s codes “provided excessive delegation of legislative powers” and that the NRA was therefore unconstitutional.4
The case came to be known as the “sick chicken case”5 and destroyed a major piece of President Roosevelt’s efforts to cope with the Great Depression.
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1. Jason Togyer, For the Love of Murphy’s: The Behind-the-Counter Story of a Great American(University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008), 55.
2. “Schechter” is a Jewish surname meaning “slaughterer” (i.e., “butcher”).
3. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Age of Roosevelt: The Politics of Upheaval (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), 278.
4. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, The Cambridge Economic History of the United States (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 978; see also http://law.jrank.org/pages/13620/L-Schechter-Poultry-Corporation-v-United-States.html.
5. Schlesinger, The Age of Roosevelt, 277.
ISRAEL:
Building and
Defending a Nation
...Jews developed Palestine for Arabs
“Absorptive capacity” was a term used extensively by the British in administering the Palestine Mandate. As the name suggests, it deals with the capacity of the land to absorb new immigrants. The ostensible purpose of Britain’s immigration policies for the territory of Palestine was to prevent working people in Palestine from losing their jobs to newly arrived immigrants, and to prevent unemployment resulting from admitting more immigrants than the local job market could handle.
The use of the term “absorptive capacity” was fraudulent on two counts. To begin with, in a land that was notoriously underdeveloped, the absorptive capacity for the foreseeable future was virtually unlimited. Secondly, the British showed no concern for overcrowding when it came to the influx of thousands of illegal Arab immigrants; they only applied this concept to Jews.
In practice, “absorptive capacity” was merely a device for severely limiting Jewish immigration. It worked something like this. Jews would apply for immigration under the quota system set by the Mandatory power. The British would then apply the “absorptive capacity” standard to limit their numbers. Then Jews would engage in developing more agricultural and industrial projects and attempt to bring in more Jews. However, news of better-paying jobs would attract masses of illegal-immigrant Arab laborers. Ignoring the origin of these illegal Arab immigrants, the British would then claim that if more Jews were allowed in, the Arab workers would be displaced. Under this system, Jewish immigration was constantly being curtailed.
Jews were put into the position of creating jobs for a few Jews and many Arabs, while needy Jews were kept out. On the other hand, if the Jews had stopped development, immigration might have been cut off altogether. Thus, the Jews were kept in a vicious cycle of expending energy and money with the Arabs being the main beneficiaries.
Perhaps the worst application of the “absorptive capacity” canard was during the Holocaust. The British would complain, “If all those Jews came in, where would we put them?” Of course, when the Jewish state was finally proclaimed, the land was able to accommodate the thousands of Jews from the displaced persons camps as well as the hundreds of thousands of Jews fleeing their former homes in Arab countries.1
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1. Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine(Chicago: JKAP Publishing, 1984), 304–11.
...Jews of Palestine denounced Jews in the British army
As the number of Jews living in Palestine increased during the period from 1880 to 1914, most of them retained citizenship from their countries of origin. They did this to protect themselves from the capricious rule of the Turks who were then sovereign in Palestine.
With the outbreak of World War I, the Turkish government initiated a severe crackdown on foreign non-Muslims who were residing in Turkey but not citizens. This led to the rapid emigration of some seven thousand Jews. In order to stem the massive emigration threatening the viability of the Jewish community, the Jews immediately decided to apply for Ottoman citizenship. Some twelve thousand Jews did so, and the following year another twenty-four thousand applied. The threat to the Jews then seemed to subside.
By 1915, as the war dragged on, able-bodied Jewish young men, previously exempt from military service, began to be drafted into labor battalions. Some Jews even petitioned for the formation of a Jew
ish fighting force on the side of the Turks. This was denied. Moreover, the Turks even began a series of anti-Jewish measures designed to stymie Zionism in Palestine. They closed the Anglo-Palestinian Bank and banned Zionist newspapers, schools, and political offices.
Meanwhile, anti-Turkish resentment began to rise among the émigrés who had fled to Egypt. Able-bodied Jewish young men began to offer themselves as fighters on the British side. While the British were reluctant to arm Jewish troops in their own units, they did agree to allow them to form the Zion Mule Corps, a five-hundred-man unit charged with running supply mules to the front lines. The unit performed admirably while suffering casualties amounting to eight killed and fifty-five wounded.
When it became widely known that the Zion Mule Corps was serving in the British army, the Jews in Palestine began to worry that it would result in more unfavorable treatment of the Jews under Turkish rule. Many of them took to the streets denouncing the mule corps as “traitors.” It all became moot when the British evacuated the Dardanelles and disbanded the Zion Mule Corps.1
This episode reflects the tenuous position of Jews without a country. Failure to support the British might have led to repatriation to places like Jew-hating Russia. Failure to support the Turks could have led to further persecution including invalidation of the Jewish land claims purchased dearly from Arab landlords. It was a no-win situation.
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1. Howard M.Sachar, A History of Israel from the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (New York: Knopf, 1996), 89–93.
...one preposition cost Israel most of its territory
As Zionism gathered steam in the early part of the twentieth century, Chaim Weizmann was in England working hard at trading in Jewish support for Britain’s political agenda in exchange for British support for the Zionist agenda. He and his colleagues submitted to key members of the British government a proposed draft of what was to become the Balfour Declaration, a document that expressed Britain’s support for the Zionist program.1 The Balfour Declaration is known today as a pivotal moment in the making of the modern State of Israel.
What many do not realize is that the Balfour Declaration went through many revisions and had to meet the approval of many politicians (including US President Woodrow Wilson2) before it was publicly issued. In the course of these political manipulations, the declaration underwent several important transformations. The original draft expressed British support for the idea that “Palestine should be reconstituted as the National Home of the Jewish people,”3 but by the time the document was actually released, it had been watered down to endorse only “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” (italics mine).
The original text implied support for a Jewish state comprising the entire territory then known as Palestine (which included the territory west of the Jordan River now known as the Kingdom of Jordan). The final version was a much more tepid endorsement that could be (and later was) construed to refer only to a part of the territory, which was subsequently carved up and given largely to the Arabs.
Thus, along with a change of the article from definite (the) to indefinite (a), and a downgrade of the concept of “national home” from capital letters to lower case,4 a preposition proved to be very costly to the Zionist enterprise.
The news of the Balfour Declaration touched off celebrations throughout the Jewish world. Amid all the rejoicing and prayers of thanksgiving, few people noticed that the establishment of Palestine as the homeland was quite different from a homeland in Palestine.
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1. Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of the Jewish People (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 991.
2. Steven L. Spiegel, The Other Arab-Israeli Conflict: Making America’s Middle East Policy, from Truman to Reagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 11.
3. Quoted in Ben-Sasson, A History of the Jewish People, 991; see also Howard M. Sachar, The Course of Modern Jewish History (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 447.
4. Fritz Liebreich, Britain’s Naval and Political Reaction to the Illegal Immigration of Jews to Palestine, 1945–1948 (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 13.
...a Zionist Jew appointed a Nazi to high office
Sir Herbert Samuel, a Zionist and a Jew, was high commissioner of Palestine from 1920 to 1925. In an incredible act of appeasement of Arab agitation, Samuel appointed the murderous Hajj Amin el-Husseini as grand mufti of Jerusalem. So notorious was Husseini that he had to be brought back from exile to assume his post. He had fled to avoid prosecution for criminal activities.
When Hitler came to power, Husseini became an active collaborator with the Nazis. He spent much of the war years in Germany assisting the Nazis in putting out propaganda, mainly against Jews. In his broadcasts, he is quoted as saying: “Arise, o sons of Arabia. Fight for your sacred rights. Slaughter Jews wherever you find them. Their spilled blood pleases Allah, our history, and our religion. That will save our honor.”1
He also organized a pro-Nazi coup in Iraq and mobilized thousands of Muslims in the Balkans to carry out atrocities against Yugoslav Jews, Serbs, and Gypsies. In 1944 he commanded a German-Arab commando unit that parachuted into Palestine to poison the wells in Tel Aviv.2 He was instrumental in organizing Arab children into Nazi Scouts and was quoted as saying that “Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime of Germany and hope for the extension of the fascist, anti-democratic, governmental system to other countries.”3
The mufti’s worst atrocity was convincing Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of implementing the Final Solution, to intervene with the Hungarian government to rescind its plan to save several thousand Jewish children from the gas chambers.4 In the event of a German victory in the war, the mufti had plans to build an Auschwitz-like death camp near Nablus (Shechem) to dispose of the Jewish population of Palestine.5
Following the war, the Nuremberg tribunals branded the mufti as a war criminal, but he escaped punishment by fleeing to Egypt, where he was granted asylum, and continued to direct other Nazi sympathizers in terrorism against Israel.6
As late as 1992, Yasser Arafat, the chairman of the Palestinian Authority, in an interview reprinted in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds, referred to Husseini as “our hero” and boasted of being “one of his troops.”7
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1. Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2003), 55.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 54.
4. Ibid.,.57.
5. Ibid., 55.
6. Ibid., 56.
7. Ibid.
...a Jew saved Czechoslovakia and Czechoslovakia saved Israel
Jan Ludvik Hoch was born in 1923, the son of a Jewish farm laborer. When the Nazis occupied his native Czechoslovakia, Hoch fled to Hungary, where he was soon arrested and imprisoned by the Nazis.1 He beat his guard to death and escaped to Syria where he joined the French Foreign Legion. Making his way to southern France, he joined the free Czech forces. At the fall of France, he was included in a contingent of Czech fighters transported to England, eventually winding up in the Somerset Light Infantry with the new name of Robert Maxwell. He served with distinction, won the Military Cross for bravery, was promoted from corporal to officer, and eventually was recruited by the British intelligence.2
His skill in languages won him a job as interrogator of prominent Nazis in Spandau Prison and later a job as a spy for the British. Posing as a purveyor of forged documents, he was instrumental in the capture of a number of Nazis in hiding.3
Recognizing his remarkable insights, the British secret service enticed Maxwell to leave the army to work for them. While in their employ, he increased his language skills by studying Russian.
In 1946, Maxwell discovered that the British M16 secret service agency was scheming to replace the free and democratic government of Czechoslovakia with a group of ex-Nazis they felt would be more cooperative with their aims. This was an affront to Maxwell,
who had lost virtually his entire family in the Holocaust. He approached his former prison cellmate, the Czech leader Vladimir Clementis, and revealed the plot. The scandal was exposed, and in the ensuing elections, the ex-Nazis were defeated and Clementis became the Czech foreign minister.4
In the meantime, the Israeli leader David Ben-Gurion was faced with dire circumstances. Heavily armed Arab nations were massing to destroy his embryonic country, and nobody would sell the beleaguered Jews any arms with which to defend themselves. In desperation, Ben-Gurion turned to Robert Maxwell. Maxwell, in turn, went to a grateful Vladimir Clementis who readily agreed to massive arms and planes shipments to Israel. Stalin was furious with the Czechs’ support of Israel, but Clementis defied him. The arms shipments were completed, and Israel won the war. Clementis and others later paid with their lives.5
Today Robert Maxwell’s memory is honored in Israel. He is buried in Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives.6
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1. David Cesarani, “Robert Maxwell,” Encyclopedia Judaica, CD-ROM Edition (Jerusalem: Keter, 1997).
2. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994), 201–3.
3. Ibid., 203.