FDR Used the Jews: A Very Revealing and Disturbing Account by the Late Father of Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu

Issue 10, Spring 2012

US President Franklin Roosevelt's Apathy for the Plight of the Jews in the Holocaust

Editor's Note: Growing up as an American Jew, and then as an adult genocide scholar, I have always been deeply concerned with the multiple failures of the United States to help the Jewish victims of the Holocaust more extensively in the course of the terrible torture and genocide of the Jews during WWII. I don't remember whether as a result of my personal psychoanalysis or otherwise, I developed a recurrent fantasy that I repeated in my mind, and used through the years as a kind of personal psychodramatic exercise:

I am a participant in a delegation of Jewish leaders who come to see FDR at the White House, and instead of being simply respectful and beseeching of help, I am openly aggressive. I bang on the president's desk loudly and say aggressively, "The respect that is certainly due you as our President in no way excuses silencing the issue of saving the lives of more Jews from the Nazis. We absolutely insist…"

I have always felt that the Jewish leadership at the time acted too respectfully and subserviently. - Israel W. Charny

In an impressive and fascinating article, Rafael Medoff presents an interview with the late Professor Benzion Netanyahu - a Jewish scholar who passed away at the age of 102 in May 2012. Medoff says he interviewed Netanyahu at length about the period in the 1940's when Benzion Netanyahu served as the Executive Director of the Revisionist Zionist Movement in the United States. Medoff places his interview with Netanyahu as taking place in June 2009 in connection with a book that Medoff was writing on President Herbert Hoover and the Jews.

The following are excerpts from Medoff's interview of Netanyahu:

Medoff: In your view, why were American Jewish leaders so cautious during the 1940s?

Benzion Netanyahu: Part of the problem was how they saw themselves. In their contacts with president Roosevelt, Jewish leaders thought of themselves as weak or helpless. Take, for example, Rabbi Stephen Wise – leader of the American Zionist movement, the American Jewish Congress and the World Jewish Congress. He thought of himself as a servant of president Roosevelt. He referred to Roosevelt as “chief,” and he really meant it that way – Roosevelt as was the chief, and Wise was the servant. Wise was happy to just follow along with whatever Roosevelt wanted. He was content as long as FDR just remembered his name or gave him a few minutes of his time every once in a while.

Medoff: What about the Jewish advisers within Roosevelt’s inner circle?

Benzion Netanyahu: FDR used Jews if they served some purpose that he needed. Samuel Rosenman was useful to him as a speechwriter. Henry Morgenthau Jr. was useful to him as secretary of the Treasury. Only a certain kind of a Jew could reach that position in Roosevelt’s administration – the kind of Jew who would not talk about Jewish issues or problems. FDR used the Jews, but there was no room in his heart for the plight of the Jewish people. In his mind, the suffering of Europe’s Jews was not included in the “Four Freedoms,” the four great principles for which America was fighting in World War II. Roosevelt had no time for the problems of the Jews.

Medoff: [What about the] Jewish leaders?

Benzion Netanyahu: Jewish leaders, too, were going about their business, and involved in all kinds of issues. And they probably were sleeping soundly at night. They did not understand the full urgency of the situation. And they had other problems, such as the problem of their big egos, especially in the case of someone like Stephen Wise. I had a meeting with him in 1940, shortly after I first arrived in the United States. He knew my father, Rabbi Nathan Mileikowsky, who was a prominent speaker for the Keren Hayesod and other Zionist causes. When I sat down with Wise, I began speaking in Hebrew. I looked upon him as if he was the chief rabbi of America, so I assumed that of course he would know how to speak Hebrew. He answered me in English – he said, “As a matter of principle, I do not speak Hebrew in private conversation.” In fact, as I later discovered, he could not speak Hebrew at all – he just could not stand the idea that anybody might think that he could not speak Hebrew. He was a bluffer. A man who was so shallow and petty was not suited to be a Jewish leader, especially one who had the responsibility to lead American Jewry in responding to the Holocaust. It is a mark of the poverty of the Jewish people that these were its leaders in those terrible times.

Source: Excerpted with permission of the author from an article by Medoff, Rafael (May 4, 2012) "FDR Used the Jews." Published in the Jerusalem Post. http://www.jpost.com/Features/InThespotlight/Article.aspx?ID=268630&R=R1

Dr. Rafael Medoff is the Director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and is coauthor, with Prof. Sonja Schoepf Wentling, of the forthcoming book "Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the 'Jewish Vote' and Bipartisan Support for Israel."

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