Introduction

In the first two years of the war, the American Jewish press had a different public and political status than its counterparts in Britain and Palestine. During this time, the United States maintained neutrality in regard to the armed conflict in Europe. Its public opinion was dominated by an isolationist mindset that separated American interests from those of the European democracies that were fighting Fascist Germany. The political slogan “America First” held sway in the public domain. Given this state of affairs, the Jewish presence, which held anti-Fascist views generally and anti-Nazi views particularly, was isolated in American public opinion and often stood accused of urging America to join a war that clashed with its national interests. On top of these woes were pronouncedly antisemitic organizations that accused the Jews of treason; their anti-Jewish propaganda persisted even after the United States declared war on Nazi Germany in December 1941.

It is against the background of this public political climate in “neutral” America that one should assess the position of the Jewish press, which ceaselessly sounded the alarm against the Nazi occupiers’ brutalities in the first two years of the war. When the United States joined the conflict, of course, the status of this press changed. Did the attitude of general public opinion toward the Jews’ fate also change? The discussion in this part of the book will attempt to answer this question.

The Optimism That Never Said Die

It was Forverts, the oldest and largest of the American Jewish newspapers, that set the tone for all its rivals in informational international and political policy during the war years.

Immediately after the fighting broke out, the armies of Nazi Germany shattering the Polish army’s defense lines, Forverts declared in its lead article, “Hitler Has Declared War on the Jewish People.” There was nothing new about this announcement in itself. After all, Hitler, ever since rising to power, had been ceaselessly portraying the Jews as Europe’s enemies generally and Germany’s particularly. Until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, however, the writer stressed, his Kampf had been against the “Jewish Bolshevism”; after the war against Britain and France erupted, there appeared a new enemy: “Jewish democracy” (idishe demokratye).