Julie Salamon: Hi everyone. Welcome to our live bonus episode of The Wreckage. I’m your host for this episode, Julie Salamon, and I’m joined by Deborah Dash Moore, Professor of History at the University of Michigan. Marc Dollinger, Professor of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University, and Gemma Birnbaum, Executive Director of the American Jewish Historical Society.
In today’s episode, we’ll talk about how World War II and the Holocaust shaped Jewish American identity, memory, and culture for generations. Much of our discussion has been inspired by you, our listeners. Thank you for tuning in and being part of the conversation. I’d like to begin with a special shout out to Rebecca Naomi Jones, star of Broadway and Off Broadway, who narrated our series.
But I want to give an even bigger shout out to Gemma Birnbaum, Executive Director of AJHS, who conceived of and wrote the series. Gemma, I’d like to start with you. This subject is so huge. Could you tell us a little bit how you decide what topics to cover, and who to invite as guests? And describe a little bit the process of creating this series, and why you thought it was important to use this particular medium.
Gemma Birnbaum: Everything kind of goes back to the collection. So, you know, 30 million individual pieces of paper, and audio visual materials, and all of these things. And so it felt really important to find ways to tell stories that could use those things. What that means is you’re dealing with more modern history because nobody’s recording anything before a certain period of time.
And so we started to think about, you know, what era we wanted to cover. And, you know, I have a background in World War II history. That’s what I did for a really long time. And one of the things I always found very frustrating about it was, where were the Jewish people who weren’t victims of the Holocaust?
And it’s not that those victims were not important. They are, they were, they will be. But there were so many other stories. It wasn’t really until I read Deborah’s book, GI Jews – that’s why it’s so exciting that like, oh my gosh, I, I know her. And she’s here with me today – that I started to see some of the things that felt like they reflected the family history that I knew.
And that felt not just unique to, you know, the family history that I had, but also that I knew a lot of American Jews did. And so we started with something that I felt like was relatable to a lot of people. Just based on, you know, whether their family had a World War II story or not. And a lot of it was because of just sort of current events.
And so, you know, this is ultimately leading into a Cold War story. We had originally wanted to just do something about the Soviet Jewry Activist Movement and, and kind of realized early on we needed to start earlier. That people didn’t necessarily have the historical background of like, what was the relationship with the USSR?
What is the relationship with Russia? And so it all kind of came back to that. And some of it was also opportunity. I get to work in a really great scholarly community. And so a lot of these interviews were like, especially as we’re starting this, and we don’t have a reputation yet, and we’re really trying to build something, I’m just going to ask my friends and they’re going to sit and they’re going to talk to me for an hour. And then we’re going to see what comes out. And there’s a lot that gets left on the cutting room floor. There’s a lot of things that we didn’t get to talk about, but when you’re honing the story, sometimes it really just has to, what is the most important point?
And what’s the one thing you want somebody to take away from an episode? We found eight points. And that’s the eight episodes. And I think every single one of them, whether they’re 22 minutes or whatever, they can all kind of be drilled down into one sentence. And I felt like that was the power of each of them.
Everything uses collection materials from AJHS and from other archives. Nothing that we do doesn’t, and I felt like that was really, that’s what was going to guide the series. Like, whenever we’re lost, just go back to what’s in the collection.
Julie Salamon: That’s great. You know, and one of the things I want to ask all of you, really, is how you as teachers use this kind of material in your classrooms.
But first, Deborah, I mean, Gemma raises a really interesting point about The Holocaust being such a central focus of Jewish memory and culture throughout the world, but especially in the United States, I would say, for the past many, many years. And yet, as an educator, seeing new generations of students come of age, come to the University of Michigan to learn about history, how do you integrate the Holocaust, what they learn about World War II from them, movies or whatever or jokes about Hitler. I don’t know. How do you see a difference in your students now and maybe 20 years ago and what they bring to the classroom in terms of their feelings about Jewish history?
Deborah Dash Moore: Oh wow, Julie, thank you for the questions and there are a lot of them there. I’m going to start just with the Holocaust and World War II to connect the GI Jews piece because that was something that I felt also when I started to work on the book itself. I knew that my father and all his buddies had, you know, been in military service in all these different branches of the military. And I was really aware that there was just no way that their distinctive Jewish experiences resonated, because they were folded into a general American experience.
And when you said Jewish and World War II, people immediately thought Holocaust. So, when I teach, and I do teach GI Jews, uh, at least, usually I use some clips from the documentary, the students 20 years ago all had grandparents who had served because, you know, well over half a million American Jews served.
So they went back to their grandparents and it was like, oh, they could connect. And I would hear from them about how, uh, So, this interest on their part in what their grand, usually grandfathers, had done made their grandfathers open up about something that they had never spoken about before, uh, which was great.
Now, it’s different, because it’s 20 years later, and, um, For many of the students who were born in the 21st century, the 20th century is very much a closed book. And so it’s really crucial when you do a podcast like this to try to bring out just what was happening there in the past, because 1945 could be, you know, 1545 for the students. It’s so utterly different and distant. There are real, real differences.
Julie Salamon: This can be both for you and Marc and Gemma, for the historians here in the room, but it’s an interesting question because I think the Holocaust has become so dominant, partly, I mean, I hate to say it, but because of its, maybe Schindler’s List, or maybe it was the Eichmann trial being broadcast on television, or the Holocaust miniseries in the late 70s, sort of, and then museums, and all these different ways it’s become dominant.
It’s a horrible, great story, right? So much tragedy, so many stories to tell. I mean, it’s just amazing. And then how do you integrate that as teachers into telling the full Jewish story? Of Jews in America and Marc, you had said something that there is this kind of narrative line between World War II and the Holocaust to the post war generation.
And how do you see the way that line is popularly perceived and how does that bump up against maybe the complexity of reality?
Marc Dollinger: Yeah, I was going to say, because I teach in the Department of Jewish Studies, I’m teaching the Holocaust pretty much in every class. It is a profound educational and personal Jewish challenge to teach this subject.
On one hand, our job as scholars and as educators is to give them the information for the midterm, but to be real about what it is we are describing makes it an impossible task. For my Intro to Jewish Studies course, I get one class on the Holocaust. This is a pedagogical and personal challenge. So I reached out to Professor Kelly, a mid era Holocaust study scholar and I said, how do you do it?
And she said, go to the archives. Now we’ll talk about the archives and get some personal testimonials of survivors and just read them for 75 minutes nonstop and then walk out the door. And I said, my students would never forgive me. And she said, and what are you as a scholar going to do to make a lesson out of what happened?
Because there was no lesson there. I opted instead to go to my students, very few Jewish students at my university. So they’re all coming into a Jewish studies course that’s going to cover this from a position of not knowing much growing up. And I said, what don’t you know? And what do you want to know? And they said, what happened? And how did it happen?
Most students do not like textbooks. I went and got the textbook on the Holocaust. Not that they love it, nobody loves that topic, but in terms of what they’re learning and how they’re learning, there is a sense by the time, in my antisemitism course where we spend a month on this, they get a feeling that, that class was worth, worthwhile, because something they couldn’t personalize, they now can.
And I’ll just share that two days ago, a student from my antisemitism class last spring asked me for a letter of recommendation. And she said, before that class, I was going to go into international business, and now I’m changing it to international relations, because I need to help make sure that doesn’t happen again.
Julie Salamon: Wow, that’s fascinating. You know, it’s interesting. I mean, I don’t know if you heard this, you know, with our new vice presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket. Tim Walz has this story now that he’s telling that he was teaching a high school class in rural Nebraska and as a class project, they learned about the Holocaust and then they took what they learned about the Holocaust and then had to try and use some system to predict where the next one would be.
This was in the early nineties and they predicted Rwanda, which turned out sadly to be correct, but the question I guess I have is, it seems so daunting what you’re saying, like, how much do you devote to sort of economic and historical factors, what was going on in Germany and Europe post World War I or for the last 500 years before that, I mean, how do you contextualize it for young students who don’t, who like Deborah said, think that 1945 was the Middle Ages?
Marc Dollinger: So this is where I guess the profession of history helps us because they have to write a paper. And when they get to that, and it gives them focus, and it gives them discipline, and they need an historical assertion, which means they need to think about how this happened, why it happened, and the significance.
Now, as historians, we’re not looking to predict the future. We leave that to the political scientists. They are inevitably wanting to figure out what happened. How they can prevent another genocide from occurring. They will then talk about Versailles treatment of Germany afterwards. Hitler as an individual.
The German people in general is another very contentious topic. The Catholic Church is another one that comes up. And then from this I introduced them to the notion of historiography. That academic historians disagree. On what causal agents are, and we all write books with our perspective, and I encourage those who are interested to, you know, go pick up a few books that are going to come from competing interpretations.
Julie Salamon: Thank you. So, Gemma, you know, if you could talk a little bit more about, within the context of this series, because I think what we’re talking about is sort of the intersection, right, of all these things. The Jews who lived in the United States for four generations and then went off to be G. I. Joes. The chaplains –
Deborah Dash Moore: GI Jews.
Julie Salamon: Sorry, GI Jews, yes. And then the chaplains I thought was also just riveting, you know, the idea of the Jewish chaplains and what their job was. And even though you didn’t want it to focus on the Holocaust, the Holocaust runs through the whole series in some way, right? And so, how did you think about how to make that obvious and just say this is what it is.
Gemma Birnbaum: I didn’t want to tell the story in a way that didn’t bring it back to our own mission. And so looking for some of these stories that featured American Jews and finding people like Ronit Stahl who could talk about that. You know, I had heard so many stories of chaplains and, you know, over my career and doing this for so long, but, you know, Klausner, who’s in our second episode, I didn’t really hear about him.
And we have these incredible papers about all of the things he had done and the way he had gone about it. And so I wanted to be able to tell the history of the Holocaust through the lens of the American Jews who helped clean it up. And I know that sounds a little flippant, but you know, there were all of these people who were mobilizing in the aftermath.
I think there’s this idea that, okay, the war is over, everything’s fine. And there’s the greatest, like the largest refugee crisis in human history. Nobody even knows how many people have died. Like, you can’t even calculate it. Who is actually doing that work? And it’s not that it’s only American Jews, but it is a lot of American Jews.
And I think there is something to be said for the idea that you know that these things are happening, and your response is to mobilize. And that there are all of these different ways that you can do it, and that there were people who were doing that. They never left the United States and they did it.
There were others who deployed and stayed abroad and were doing that. There are still people fighting in the Pacific because that doesn’t end. I mean, like you’re talking about trying to fix one area of the world when the other is still experiencing some of the largest bloodshed that has ever occurred, at a pace that is so rapid that you can’t even keep up with the death count.
All of those things have to coexist and all of them are reflected in these very individual stories through these diaries, through these, you know, notes that they were sending to each other and these letters, through military records. All of that is on the other side of the wall every day from where I sit.
And there was no way that I could think of telling some of these things without just bringing those people kind of more into the light. And it was a way to teach about the Holocaust, whether you know a lot about it or you don’t know a lot about it, from a different perspective. And I feel like there’s been a lot of talk about, like, what did Americans know and what didn’t they know?
But there’s a very specific, what did Jewish Americans know that is different from the rest of the population. Because of proximity, because of family. And that was what I really wanted to get to. And then in the background there’s this sort of like, Oh, also there’s the USSR. And everybody’s just sort of like, we’ll deal with that later.
And eventually later comes.
Deborah Dash Moore: I think one of the other things that’s really interesting about looking at the responses of American Jews is the role of women, who were very active. They may not have been mobilized in the military service, but once the war in Europe ended, they rushed to provide all kinds of aid and to organize. And you have a number of women. References and stuff in the podcast that bring these activities of these women to light, which had tended not to be as present. And again, I recognize that it does come from your, the archives, right? The American Jewish Historical Society has papers of these women activists, which I think is really great.
Julie Salamon: So, Marc, I want to ask you, and then actually all of you, I mean, this notion of even the title of the series, The Wreckage, to me is so evocative, obviously, in so many ways. But it is, as Gemma was saying, the idea that here’s this world that’s just been blown up. You know, the complete destruction of an entire civilization, in a way, in Europe.
I mean, in a lot of ways, Hitler accomplished what he set out to do. He destroyed the vast majority of Jewish culture in Europe, and yet When you’re teaching a course about the Holocaust, say, how do you present the notion of the roots of Zionism, which I think now is sort of bandied around in a lot of ways without any idea of what the history of that is.
And I think that, too, comes out of the wreckage. I mean, obviously, Zionism had existed before, but I think the power of it after, The Holocaust took on a different meaning and I wonder for the two of you teaching, how do you deal with that, especially in today’s hypercharged atmosphere?
Marc Dollinger: So this is where the world of today meets the world of yesterday. I teach at one of the most anti-Zionist universities in the country in terms of its larger political culture. I’ll just share that in my Jewish studies seminars since October 7th, there seems to be a need by students to preface any comment related to the course description on Zionism by saying I’m not a Zionist. And then that gives them permission to talk. So what I’m doing in this, and this is where we as scholars are teaching, you know, American Jewish history in one sense, but we’re teaching our current students as they are now.
And if we don’t take a student centered approach to where they’re at, it’s much more difficult to bring them to where we want them to be in the syllabus. I want them to know that the word Zionism was actually invented in biblical times, and it comes from text, that we start there. And then the second part of it is the modern political Zionist movement of Herzl, late 19th century, and then we go from there.
And then the Shoah, the Holocaust, now gets put as sort of a third moment. You know, that’s how I periodize it, so they can understand that there’s a prehistory to it. And then once we get to the American Jewish experience, really what I’m focusing on is how it is, that American Jews who have been so relatively successful in the United States are going to face the notion of an ideology that says they’re not safe.
At the time that European Jewry all but ended, at least Eastern European. And for an American Jewish historian, to live in that tension of that space really also sets us up well for launching the, the post-war period is, and suburbanization and, and what Zionism look like if you’re an American Jew and you’re staying in the United States.
Julie Salamon: How did the students respond to it?
Marc Dollinger: I’m just, okay. There is a power differential, so they do smile and nod at me when I do that. I don’t know what they’re saying when they’re walking down the hall after the class is over. The feedback though, that I, that I am getting and that I do get from them. It’s usually a, a big inhale and exhale and an appreciation that there was a moment and a time to pause and to get a sense of a bigger, more complicated picture and an understanding that when they hear vocabulary out in the student quad, that there’s more to those words than what they’re hearing there.
I have to be clear. My job is not identity formation because I’m an academic and a scholar. And I also have to say, especially in the current political climate, I am of course not. A Jewish faculty member in the Department of Jewish Studies, in this case, teaching about Zionism, and then you link that with the Holocaust and genocide, and then you put that to today and it’s all out there.
Deborah Dash Moore: So I have a slightly different approach, and part of what you said I do also in terms of the history, but when I get to the post-war period. I share with them clips from the movie, Exodus, and those clips show them how American Jews invented an Israel for the silver screen, an Israel that was very popular among Americans more broadly.
What relationship it actually has to the Jews, to the actual Israel, that’s a whole nother matter, but in terms of popular consciousness, Exodus, the book, first by Leon Uros and then the movie, it swept America. Um, to the extent that when you have the war in ‘67, you have reputable publications like the New York Times describing people, generals, in terms of the fictional characters of Exodus.
Marc Dollinger: The casting of Paul Newman also probably helped.
Deborah Dash Moore: Oh yes, Paul Newman was very, yes, very attractive, yes.
Julie Salamon: So, in The Wreckage podcast series, we move from the refugees in Europe come and care, and then we’re in the late 1940s, and by then, obviously, we’re no longer allies of the Soviet Union, and in the first episode, it’s so riveting looking at the way Berlin was divided and the governing of Germany, and it’s so hard to even imagine now, this whole idea of, okay, you won the war, now what?
But, but then. This great fear of communism becomes so over overwhelming, so dominant, and there’s a Jewish aspect to it that is A little frightening actually to read about in retrospect because there were so many specters of the Jewish problem kind of reasserting itself in a way. And I was wondering as, as teachers and as scholars, how you deal with the communist period and how you decided to deal with it, Gemma, in terms of the podcast series.
Gemma Birnbaum: So some of this also was me sort of channeling anger and like trying to figure out how to deal with current events. And there was this sort of trend I was, it doesn’t seem like it’s a lot of people, but it’s a loud number of people who seem to think Stalin wasn’t that bad. He was really bad. I mean, you’re talking about millions of people starving, millions of people being murdered.
One of the things I found the most sort of enlightening, even just in doing these interviews with the scholars for the episodes, was when Hasia Diner mentions, you know, this idea that a lot of the, the majority of refugees that come to the United States after the war who are Jewish, are from the Soviet Union.
They don’t say that they’re from the USSR. They say that they’re from Germany because they’re going to be treated better if they think you’re a German Jew than if you come to the United States and you say you’re from the Soviet Union and a Jew.
And that’s because increasingly they are the enemy. The Soviet Union is the enemy. Germany is just sort of, they’ve been defeated. They’re puttering along. The allies are governing those things. And so there was, you know, as we, as we look at sort of political situations now, it’s, it’s not our job as historians or as people creating these things to comment on those, but it is our responsibility to create understanding of historical context.
And I couldn’t live with the idea that people thought Stalin might have been not that bad. Because he’s just, it’s just indisputably terrible.
Julie Salamon: Yeah, but I, I’m going to ask the, the history professors here because Yes, true, but I think there was a feeling among idealistic Jews here, probably more in the 30s, about communism that wasn’t really related to what was going on with Stalin, that ended up having really very devastating repercussions for them, and I wonder how you guys have dealt with that as historians and teaching your students, or if that’s something that you haven’t really dealt with too much.
Deborah Dash Moore: Well, okay. So, The people who suffered in the anti communist purges, and McCarthyism generally, Some of them were communists. They supported the Soviet Union, they idolized Stalin, they found excuses for the Hitler Stalin Pact, right? They were, I’d say, for Brentic communists. They really believed it. But then there were a whole bunch of other people who fell into this category called fellow travelers, who supported socialism, left wing, uh, the popular front, especially in the late 30s. I mean, after all, who was opposing Franco? Right? In the Spanish Civil War. So they may have joined these other organizations, these Popular Front organizations, and no, they didn’t sign on the line. They weren’t communists.
And when the Hitler Stalin Pact occurred, they moved out of the Popular Front. But after the war, they’re targeted as well. Not just the communists, and they are among the ones who suffer, I would say, most severely because they’re faced with what had been okay to do back a decade before. You know, in 1937 it was okay, and then in 1947 it’s not okay, and how to deal with being For names, right, if you’re called up, or being faced with blacklists in a whole bunch of different industries, so it’s a really complicated to try to explain both in the classroom, but even in general, because all of these people take very different positions.
And next to the fellow travelers are all of their friends, who may not have been fellow travelers, but who know, ah, this was a good person, you know, and this person doesn’t deserve to lose a job. And this, right, it’s really tough.
Julie Salamon: Marc?
Marc Dollinger: I like to make a case for Jewish studies in general and American Jewish history in particular, which is to say, at least in the humanities, I think studying the Jews can give scholars in other disciplines, insights, perspectives, and understandings that they won’t get in any other discipline.
Even if that’s not true, I’m just going to make that case. And looking, the question you asked is perfect. All right. Turns out there was a whole lot of Jewish communists. When the Cold War began and turned out there were a whole lot of Jewish people moving into the middle class, moving into privilege, and when the Cold War gets intense, are on the leading edge of anti communism to protect themselves as they move up the social ladder.
So among American Jews and in American Jewish history. We can tell the story of legitimate bonafide communists and [00:28:00] legitimate bonafide anti communists going after each other. And the Rosenberg trial, Professor Moore can tell us more about it, had a Jewish defendant, Jewish prosecutor, Jewish judge. I don’t know if the bailiff was Jewish, but if we just take a snapshot of that scene.
Deborah Dash Moore: The jury was not Jewish.
Marc Dollinger: (Laughter) There we go. And that, right. Right. So how, how does that, a snapshot, a photograph of that room reflect the complexity of American Jewish history and then the complexity of what it is to be Jewish in anti communist America?
Julie Salamon: That is a really fascinating way to look at American history and um, I’d like to take both of your courses.
It sounds really terrific. So looking back at these events and looking back at this moment in history. I think, depending on when you were born, you might be able to see the line between the wreckage, the post war [00:29:00] years, and where we are today, but as you said, these are generations later. These are, you have students who were born in the 21st century, as Deborah said.
How do these events, do you think, continue to impact Jewish identity, communities, politics, and Everything, the, the, all of these, you know, incredibly complex, divergent things that came out of the war for the whole world, but I think for Jews in particular because of the Holocaust.
Deborah Dash Moore: That’s an exceedingly big question because there are a variety of different strands.
So one of the things that, We didn’t get to in the, the first series particularly are the roots of American feminism, which is also Jewish and which plays out in really important ways in the 21st century and that the students have been affected by [00:30:00] it often through their families and, and their mothers specifically.
That’s another piece of the story. Now, does it matter that Betty Friedan, you know, was on the left and writing for, you know, a left wing Communist magazine as a, as a journalist before she Moves to the suburbs and, and, you know, discovers the, the problem that has no name, as she calls it. That’s another strand that one has to be sensitive to.
So, some of the things that we’ve mentioned get channeled into other areas. I think civil rights is another one of them that reverberates today as well.
Julie Salamon: I’m glad you brought that up because I wanted to ask Marc about that because when you said that if you look at the communist situation sounds so strange but you know the [00:31:00] whole variety of things that emerged from communism with Jews being on sort of all sides of that issue and then civil rights post war, you know, Hubert Humphrey giving that great speech at the Democratic National Convention and the civil rights movement really starting to take root. How much of that? Was a product of many things and had been going on in this country for many, many years. But did the Holocaust, what was the effect of it as a catalytic force?
Marc Dollinger: Another really easy question. So, let’s take the contemporary moment and we’ll take three letters. of the English alphabet, D, E, and I, and we’ll put them in that order.
Because when you put those three letters in order right now, it causes a lot of consternation amongst many American Jews, diversity, equity, inclusion, certainly post October 7th. Now, no Jewish person can be seen as privileged after Auschwitz. The impact of the Holocaust in American Jewish life [00:32:00] and certainly the rest of the Jewish world is unimaginable to think. that this genocide could have occurred at this time in this place. So there is in the consciousness of American Jews in the post war period, a sense of vulnerability and fear and memory, first person memory. And now we come, you know, 50, 70, 80 years later where American Jews have done quite well in this culture and society and are now perceived Certainly, by communities of color with a very different narrative than the internalized narrative that American Jews have after the Holocaust.
And I find whether it’s civil rights movement or the current climate on my campus and on others is really the crashing together of two different historical narratives. The one that American Jews [00:33:00] take after the Holocaust. And the sense of what that means to them against a one generated by an extraordinary social mobility in American Jewish life after World War II, which is going to seem to be pressing in an opposite direction.
And then I think we’re sort of almost hopelessly divided between the two narratives.
Julie Salamon: I mean, we could do a whole seminar just on that subject. I did want to ask…
Deborah Dash Moore: Wait, can I just interrupt a sec? So among those examples of the sense of vulnerability and is one that I, I mentioned to you, Gemma, when we were talking earlier and isn’t really visible in the archives, which is in a sense too bad, but it’s certainly known among a generation and that was that American Jews practiced a boycott.
Boycott in those years, a boycott of German products. [00:34:00] It wasn’t official. There were no pronouncements about it. It just was really widespread among American Jews. So yes, as they were moving up, but they didn’t buy the, the nice German, you know, equipment that they could have bought for the kitchen or. You know, or the cars or, or whatever it, it just, and it lasted really until the baby boomer generation came of age.
And, you know, they were, they were tempted by the Volkswagen, for example. It’s a sign of what you’re talking about, the way in which the consciousness of the Holocaust is internalized. And the feeling that we’re going to do something, we’re not talking about it, but we’re doing something.
Marc Dollinger: I’ll add just a personal anecdotal story. When I was in graduate school, I was teaching in a synagogue and the rabbi drove up in a BMW and I kind of flinched, you know, that the rabbi would drive that car. And then there was on the pages of the Los Angeles Jewish newspaper, a debate in contemporary times about whether it would be acceptable, you know, for Jewish people to stop that boycott.
Julie Salamon: So interesting. You know, I was saying that to somebody the other day that whenever. One gets discouraged about all the different ways one can get discouraged about contemporary times. You do have to look at Germany that in 1945 was looked at as the scourge of the world and the most terrible country ever.
And Hitler is still the most popular villain available in popular culture. And yet Germany itself has evolved into one of the more progressive and successful countries in the world. And so. I guess that’s a little bit of hopefulness here in the middle of these discussions. You know, Gemma, I did want to ask you because the series definitely really cuts a broad swath coming out of this and even though it’s in such a relatively short period of time and one thing you do deal with that I do want to mention because it’s such a great episode is the episode on the development of the atomic bomb and the interview with Kai Bird which is so good and even if you’ve seen the movie, it’s still, uh, I think added so much depth and resonance to that story and I I wanted to know why you decided to particularly include that.
I mean, I can guess why, but what it was about that that you felt was so important to include in the series.
Gemma Birnbaum: So some of it is like trying to follow a narrative. It’s sort of that cumulative storytelling. And so if you’re going to, from the American Jewish perspective, talk about the end of the war in the Pacific, you have to kind of do it through Oppenheimer.
That’s the American Jewish story. He’s not necessarily observant. He’s raised in. you know, this, this other sort of like humanist tradition and religion, but ultimately comes to sort of find a sort of reconciliation in his Judaism and what that means. And so if you’re trying to figure out a way to do that, he was the easiest way to do that.
I also really wanted to meet Kai Bird. Like I love that book. I loved it 20 years ago. And so, you know, him immediately replying and saying like, Oh yeah, I’ll come talk to you. I live like 10 blocks away was the coolest day. And so some of it was also taking advantage of the fact that we do have this, like, intellect that is very nearby.
And that was coming off of a movie. It was, you know, there’s also real value, especially if you’re looking at something trying to broaden an audience, in, in using somebody that’s immediately now recognizable to millions of people. You don’t have to explain too much who he is to get into the heart of the matter.
And so it makes it a lot easier to, to kind of introduce a very complicated story, effectively because Kai already did. And then this movie already did. And so somebody who wasn’t necessarily, you know, was a household name, sort of has this fall from grace in this way after the war, and is now a household name again in this way, it was a really interesting way, I think, to kind of end the chapter of ongoing conflict.
And then the way Kai tells it is just so interesting, and so beautiful, and, and, and, you know, really kind of emphasizing how complicated a lot of feelings are, and that Oppenheimer wasn’t the only one who had those complicated feelings, and that we’re still debating it 75, 80 years later. That was the part I found really kind of interesting to explore.
Deborah Dash Moore: Not to mention the fact that AJHS has the Straus papers.
Gemma Birnbaum: Oh my goodness, those papers. I think what’s, you know, it’s funny because requests for those really went up after the movie came out, but they have nothing to do with the Atomic Energy Commission. It’s all about his work as, you know, helping refugees in Europe and doing so very effectively and so he’s portrayed as this utter villain and then you look at these papers, you’re like, he’s helping like hundreds of people escape Europe.
And you having to hold those two ideas at the same time, and the fact that, you know, we sometimes, I think, try to put people into boxes because it’s the easiest way to understand. That man cannot be put into a box. I mean, like, everything about his life was kind of a contradiction in some ways, but also perfectly kind of reflects the background that he had.
But yeah, and suddenly all of us, like, we were like, why is everybody requesting these papers? Oh, Robert Downey Jr.
Julie Salamon: It’s a very interesting thought that you have just made me think of, which is this dichotomy that with the Holocaust, it’s the Jewish victimization, the horror of what happened, and then in Oppenheimer, it flips, right?
Oppenheimer becomes part of the oppressor, if you look at the bomb as a terrible thing, although I think Gemma had mentioned that a lot of young people today didn’t even realize that the United States was fighting Japan, or maybe Deborah, you were saying it, that, that a lot of young people didn’t realize that Japan was fighting the U. S. at that time, and I was wondering for Marc, Deborah, again, do you deal with that sort of complexity, and maybe that’s what you’re saying is the biggest is the value and beauty of history in these archives that things don’t necessarily line up into good guys and bad guys as we kind of would like them to in popular culture.
Marc Dollinger: It’s one of the things I love about my undergraduates. It’s developmentally appropriate for Young twenty somethings to be engaged with grand philosophical and ethical questions that they are confident they know the answer to. Uh, and the notion of dropping the first bomb, but actually the bigger question is the dropping of the second bomb.
Whether or not, that is just a great opening for them. And then generally they will go off in a very uninformed way, mostly in a performative nature. And then that gives me an opportunity then to, then bring in a lot of the other historical data. Uh, And what it would have been really like to have been the one to have had to make that decision to have to weigh and assess what’s going to be horrible on one side against something that’s horrible on the other.
And then how do you move forward there? And then they tend to get very quiet very quickly. And then that’s when I have a sense that we’re moving forward. Well, it’s great.
Julie Salamon: Deborah?
Deborah Dash Moore: Actually, I don’t discuss the bomb, which is really interesting. I don’t have a particular narrative to tell you about that. I do think that the good guys, bad guys simplicity is easily confronted as it were, right? And you mentioned the Rosenberg case and that’s one of the places where I do that because you’ve got, you know, Ethel. And, Ethel, is she really guilty? Should she be killed together with her husband?
And then you got the brother. You didn’t mention him, right? So the family drama, and it’s his testimony that’s going to convict his sister and her husband in order to protect his wife. And then you’ve got the, right? So you’ve got the, you’ve got the, the Park Avenue judge, the boy judge, very talented young man, right?
A privileged upbringing, you know? So different from the poverty of the Lower East Side, of the Rosenbergs, and the prosecutors, um, Roy Cohn, and, uh, anyhow. It’s a really complicated story, and that’s the one that I tend to use with all of these Jewish protagonists. As I said, with the exception of the jury, and, and the, the, uh, foreman of the jury was, was feeling, you know, very good.
He said, you know, because, uh, there were no Jews on the jury, so it, it was, uh, an objective jury. He felt judging, judging the Jews in the case.
Julie Salamon: So I think we’re getting close to the end of our time. So a lot of our listeners, and I felt very much the same way, have said that they thought they knew this period of history very well, but listening to our podcast series, they learned so much. And I was wondering if this is for all of you, if there was anything in this series of eight episodes that didn’t make it that you wish had, that would have rounded out this discussion.
Marc Dollinger: Before I answer that, I just want to just offer another reflection on this series. Something was going on at that historical moment, and I think through all of the episodes this year, American Jews were becoming the center of world Jewish life and world Jewish history.
That for a thousand years before, the center of Jewish life was in Europe and mostly Eastern Europe. State of Israel will be created in 1948, and then there’ll be a, you know, a claim for there. But, as all of these individuals’ stories were being told, I don’t think they understood really the implications of what they were doing.
That truly, all of world history was on their shoulders, as they were working through the various jobs that they were doing to get there. I could think of another group afterwards, and the only thing I could think of is just ordinary American Jewish people, and how those stories would have landed on them, sort of an opportunity to reflect against all of the episodes to see in that time period what was landing and how it was landing and any meaning we can have from an ordinary experience reflected back to a lot of these folks who were just heroic.
Julie Salamon: As I’ve been listening to all of you, I think, you know, a lot of these stories are very, we would say Shakespearean and sort of their high drama and the kinds of epic decisions that people have made.
But I guess we could also say they’re a bit biblical, right? Because I think we’re looking at people who are facing not just life and death issues for themselves, but for not just an entire people, but the entire world. And they’re dealing with the consequences of behaving very badly, of mankind behaving very badly.
Thank you guys so much. Gemma, as the creator of this series, I’d like to give you the final word.
Gemma Birnbaum: Oh gosh. The thing I want people to take away from it is everybody has the power to do something. It’s up to you to decide what that power can be used for. I think what, you know, what I really love about all the people we’ve been able to pull out of the archive and in these interviews is, you know, everybody is complicated.
Nobody’s just all good or all bad. You know, it ranges, you’ve got scientists, you’ve got politicians, you’ve got humanitarian workers, you’ve got straight up spies, and I think everybody thought they were doing the thing they thought was right. Doesn’t mean it always was, and so we all have a responsibility to figure out what we can do with the power that we have, whether that’s big or small, whether we’re Jewish or not, we all have a responsibility, and I think we sometimes can forget that.
Julie Salamon: Today’s episode was taped live at Sound Lounge. Our thanks to Deborah Dash Moore, Marc Dollinger, and Gemma Birnbaum for joining us today, and to Russ & Daughters for their generous sponsorship of this event. For a transcript of this episode, additional show notes, and links to relevant AJHS collections, visit www.ajhs.org/podcasts. And if you enjoyed this season, be sure to leave us a rating on your preferred podcast platform. Don’t forget to join us again in January 2025 for season two, American Subversives. Thank you so much for joining us.
