By Farley Weiss, JNS
Still, there is no outsized role that accounts for the wave of antisemitism directed toward these Americans.
The rise of Jew-hatred in America is not only under the guise of anti-Zionism, but it also promulgates the false belief that Jews have exercised too much political power in America and that this alleged power has been used to promulgate views that are not in America’s interest. The fact of the matter is that American history is replete with evidence that the Jewish influence—to whatever extent it has been on American politics—has been overwhelmingly beneficial to America's interest and that American history is replete with examples of the lack of Jewish influence in American politics.
Jews first arrived in America in 1654, and by the early 1700s, Jewish communities were established in Newport, R.I.; Charleston, S.C.; and Philadelphia. Chaim Solomon was a Jewish financier and banker arrested by the British during the American Revolution. Sentenced to death, he escaped and helped finance the American Revolutionary War. He was never repaid for his efforts and died in poverty in 1785.
Other positive contributions from American Jews was the establishment of the five-day work week, in part due to the influx of religious Jews who would not work on Saturday (Shabbat) at a time when there was a six-day work week in America. In 1952, some 58,000 cases of polio struck America. Due to vaccines developed by American Jews Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin, that number dropped to 1,000 in 1962 and has been nearly eradicated on a global level.
A famous area of Jewish political influence in America is when Albert Einstein famously wrote to U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that an atomic bomb was possible, which led to the Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer, another Jew. The result was that America beat the Germans to the bomb, used it on Japan to end the war, and likely saved more than 1 million lives in total and hundreds of thousands of American ones.
The first major attack on alleged Jewish influence in politics was by Charles Lindbergh and others who were isolationists and opposed American involvement in World War II. The National WWII Museum in New Orleans pointed out that the United States was so far behind on military spending that it was only considered the 14th strongest military power in the world. Washington only joined the war after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941.
The day afterward, Roosevelt declared war on Japan. Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, forcing it to declare war on them.
The fact that Jews were being murdered in Nazi Germany had absolutely nothing to do with the United States declaring war on Germany.
The American Jewish leadership failed to convince the Roosevelt administration to fulfill the existing quota of allowing Jews fleeing Germany to come to America, never mind allowing the St. Louis to unload 937 Jews in America fleeing Germany. Even though bombing the railroad lines to the concentration camps likely would have saved a massive number of Jewish lives, Roosevelt never did so. Further, since the Nazis prioritized these death camps above the war effort, it is likely that destroying the railroad lines would have benefited the U.S. war effort, yet it wasn’t done by Roosevelt, despite pleas from American Jews.
Despite recognizing the establishment of the modern-day State of Israel in 1948, U.S. President Harry S. Truman turned down Jewish requests to help arm the 600,000 Jews in the fledgling nation to fight the multiple Arab army invaders that massively outnumbered them. This was less than four years after the Holocaust and the systematic murder of 6 million Jews in Europe.
In 1967, when the Arab armies massed to attack Israel, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson turned down requests from Israel and American Jews to militarily assist Israel after the French had switched sides before the war. Israel was left with no allies against larger, better-equipped Arab armies. Miraculously, Israel was able to launch a preemptive strike and defeat the Arab armies in six days. During the war, Jordan ignored Israel’s requests to stay out of the war and attacked Israel. In a defensive measure, Israel took the eastern part of Jerusalem, and Judea and Samaria (West Bank) from Jordan. It was only in 1968 that U.S. President Lyndon Johnson first started to supply American planes to Israel.
The most successful Jewish lobbying effort by mainly American Jews was the Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry, whose rallies led to the Jackson-Vanik Amendment to condition Soviet and U.S. trade relations on its allowing Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union. The rallies culminated with more than 400,000 people rallying in Washington, D.C., during the Reagan administration. Eventually, the trade restrictions helped lead to the economic and political collapse of the Soviet empire and the end of the Cold War, when as many as 2 million Soviet Jews left the Soviet Union.
And that’s just in the 20th century.
American Jews have the right of all Americans to be involved politically. History has shown the positive nature of that involvement, as well as the lack of influence of American Jews throughout American political history, despite the importance of those issues to American Jews. Accordingly, it is obvious that those who complain about the outsized role of Jewish influence on American policies lack a historical basis for this allegation and are simply repeating antisemitic canards.
