Archival Audio, Levittown Newsreel:
“Five years ago this was a vast checkerboard of potato farms on New York’s Long Island. Today, a community of 60,000 persons living in 15,000 homes all built by one firm: this is Levittown, one of the most remarkable housing developments ever conceived. The idea that came to a man named Bill Levitt was this: why not apply to the building of houses the same principles that have brought other American industries to their unexcelled peaks of efficiency and service. Why not mass-produce the elements that go to make up a house, just as the auto industry does with the parts that go into a new car? Bill Levitt had some other ideas: put kitchen and bathroom back to back and let them share the same plumbing so that your plumbers do their work without interruption and without waiting for the carpenter or the bricklayer to get out of the way. We cut your lumber so it’s all ready to be assembled into the frame of a house. With the waste removed, one crock can deliver to the building site all the rough lumber that will go into two complete Levitt homes.”
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Nostalgic images of postwar America often include sprawling suburbs, affluence, and unprecedented opportunity to achieve the American Dream. But for many Americans, this idealized version was far from the whole story.
For a number of Jewish Americans, in the wake of World War II, and as the true extent of the destruction became more apparent, there was a great desire to participate both locally and nationally in efforts to advocate for Holocaust victims, lobby for changes to international law, and memorialize those lost. It was through political activism, systems of law, and the arts that communities sought remembrance, justice, and the preservation of Jewish culture.
From the American Jewish Historical Society, this is The Wreckage: Year Zero. I’m your host, Rebecca Naomi Jones. This week’s episode, The Advocates, explores the complexities of postwar life, and the ways that Jewish Americans reshaped their political lives as they grappled with an uncertain future.
Joining us is Dr. Hasia Diner, professor emerita at New York University, and author or editor of more than 20 books, including We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence After the Holocaust.
Hasia Diner: So, I think in those early years what’s really notable is how American Jewish, at the organizational level, began to take—first shifted away from saying, on larger political issues, we’re sort of neutral. We only deal with those issues that are Jewish. Now, individual Jews may have been long involved with civil rights and other kinds of concerns, but not the organizations. And the Holocaust caused those organizations to say, you know what? We actually have a stake in the remaking of American society, partly because of the legacy of what just—it’s not legacy—what just happened. And we have to find ways to restructure our communities to deal with both picking up the pieces there and ensuring a different kind of America which will be good for us. And we’re not going to do it on our own, but we have to do it with others. And this message or this—what happened to the Jews of Europe is our guiding principle.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: On April 8, 1946, splashed across the front page of the New York Times, and inconspicuously sandwiched between articles on an alliance between the Soviet Union and Iran, and a bus strike impacting commuters in Long Island, appeared the headline:
“Rifkind Says Settling of Jews Is Urgent, Backs Army Care.”
Judge Simon Rifkind, himself an immigrant from the Russian Empire’s Meretz, Lithuania, who arrived in New York City at the age of nine, was special advisor on Jewish affairs to Eisenhower. In a memo to General Joseph McNarney, he pleaded with the administration for sympathetic treatment of refugees, making note of the 6 million Jews who had perished. Later that year, Judge Rifkind spoke to the Anglo-American Commission of Inquiry on Palestine, urging support of Jewish refugee resettlement to Mandatory Palestine.
“The introduction of rehabilitation and training programs has been sluggish,” Judge Rifkind admonished in his memo. “The educational and religious program needs intensification.”
Rifkind was just one of the significant figures who helped to shape American Jewish political identity and in turn, American policy. Attorney Raphael Lemkin left Poland in September 1939, just days after the Nazi invasion that ignited World War II. He barely escaped capture, and made it to Sweden by the spring of 1940 before he settled in the United States in 1941.
Hasia Diner: He was one of the few members of his family to survive. But he had become interested in the concept of genocide—indeed, he coined the word—looking at the experience of the Armenians under the heel of the Turks in the early part of the twentieth century. So he became really fascinated with that. He comes to the United States, and he is essentially sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. And he begins this process—the war hadn’t even quite ended—to draft this document called the Genocide Convention, the treaty on genocide, the Genocide Convention. And the idea was to take it to all the nations of the world and to ask them to pass it and to pledge themselves to define genocide as a crime.
Archival Audio – Quincy Howe Interviewing Raphael Lemkin:
Quincy Howe:
“Lemkin, who is a professor of law at Yale University and specializes in teaching matters about the United Nations. Dr. Lemkin is the man who created the word genocide and really
has fought this thing from long long ago. Dr. Lemkin, could you give us a little background on how you came to be interested in this genocide fight originally?”
Raphael Lemkin:
“Gladly, Mr. Howe. It leads me very far back to my childhood. Everybody has sentimental memories from childhood and everybody has a book he loved most. One of my inspirations in this field was a book by shinkerich krovadis which described the terrible sufferings of other Christians. Later on I became interested in genocide because it happened so many times. It happened to the armenians and, after the armenians, uh got a very rough deal at the Versailles conference because the criminals were guilty of genocide were not punished you know that they’ve organized a organization a terroristic organization which took justice in their own hands.
The trial of Paul Talat Pasha 9 21 in Berlin is very instructive; a man whose mother was killed in genocide cases killed a lot bashar and he told the court that he did it because his mother came in in his sleep and incited him many times. Here is a murder of your mother you don’t think about. And so he committed a crime. So you see, as a lawyer, I thought that crime should not be punished by the victims, but should be punished by the court by international law.”
Hasia Diner: So, he’s a kind of shadow employee of American Jewish Congress, which makes it an inherently American Jewish story. But beyond that, in the years that it was—it came before the United States Senate, it was American Jewish organizations that were pushing for it, and several of the—and unsuccessfully. The United States is one of the last countries in the world to sign it, to pass it. And several of the senators who were in favor—and congressmen—said, It was only American Jews who were pressuring us to pass this. And organizations across the spectrum were, again, writing to their congressmen “pass the Genocide Convention in the name of the 6 million.” The Synagogue Council of America declared, year after year, Genocide Convention Sabbath. And they asked every rabbi to devote his sermon—and “his” because they were only men at the time—to the Genocide Convention and getting congregants to write to their representatives in Congress. And so that—now, it does pass eventually. But American Jews stood up for this, as, one might almost say, again, the lega—the pain of what had happened and a very forward-looking vision: this shouldn’t happen again.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Lemkin also served as part of Robert H. Jackson’s legal team during the Nuremberg trials, aiding in the successful prosecution of dozens of Nazi war criminals. Throughout the 1950’s, Lemkin continued this important work, meeting with representatives of multiple nations to outlaw genocide. In 1953, he publicly accused the Soviet regime of genocide in Ukraine, asserting that their starvation of the population was intentional, and not simply a consequence of their economic policies.
In 1959, impoverished and feeling that much of his work had been in vain, Raphael Lemkin died of a heart attack at just 59 years old. He was laid to rest at Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing, Queens. Thirty years after his passing, his work would be instrumental in inspiring the prosecution of those who enacted genocides in Yugoslavia and Rwanda, proving that his work had not been in vain.
Hasia Diner: So, at every level—at the federal level, in terms of Congress, at the state level, local level—Jews with political clout or with political visibility were pushing for legislation, were pushing for US aid, were pushing for denazification and the like. So, I mean, you could look at someone like Herbert Lehman, who had been on the ground with UNRRA in Europe, and then he’s the senator, and he’s there pushing for the Genocide Convention, and he’s pushing for aid for the DPs and for facilitating immigration to the United States. Emanuel Celler, the congressman from Brooklyn, is pushing for the change of immigration legislation.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Celler, a Jewish congressman who represented New York City from 1923 until 1973, was greatly influenced by the events of World War II. He was keenly aware that the restrictive immigration quotas that had been in place before and during the Nazi era directly contributed to more lives lost. He fought for decades to ease these restrictions.
In 1965, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law the Hart-Celler Act, which removed these quotas, and ushered in a new wave of migration that permanently changed the demographics of the United States.
In the years after World War II, many Jewish Americans found ways to memorialize victims of the Holocaust through dance, music, sculpture, visual arts, literature, and theater. In addition to serving as an outlet to process the trauma of the war, these works also served to educate both the general public, and the next generation of American Jews.
Hasia Diner: So in the late 1940s, a modern dancer by the name of Sophie Maslow, who was a protégé of Martha Graham’s, premiered a piece at the 92nd Street Y called The Village I Knew. It was based on Sholem Aleichem folk stories. But in the program notes it said, “This is dedicated to the memory of the 6 million.” Choruses, Jewish choruses, sang Holocaust music. There’s a group in Chicago, the Halevi Society, and in the program notes for its concert in the early fifties does—sings a few songs which the words come from the poet Mordechai Gebirtig, who’s one of the victims. And in the program notes, it said, okay, there are songbooks for Jewish community centers, for youth groups, for synagogue groups, and they all have a special section, in fact, called Songs of the Catastrophe. And it will have “Ani Ma’amin,” and “The Partisans’ Hymn,” “Es Brent,” and there are cantatas that were written. There were plays written. Some of them have a bigger life than the congregation or the JCC where they were performed. But these are all examples of using the arts to tell the story.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: Film was also an important way for American Jews to reckon with the Holocaust, and to educate the public about the true extent of its destruction.
Some Jewish aid organizations, including the National Council of Jewish Women and Hadassah, sponsored the making of these films, which helped raise funds for their initiatives that helped Holocaust survivors resettle and restart their lives.
Hasia Diner: And so they would have a kind of either documentary or more imaginative film in which there would be the story of a Holocaust child who survives, and there’s no parents. And the idea is, yes, to pull the heartstrings of the viewers to then donate money for the relief of those people still in the displaced persons camp. So, on the one hand, it was just everyplace, and it wasn’t the only thing that was being done, but the idea that the arts could be used to tell the story of what happened and, in telling the story, it was a form of memorialization because this happened; but it was also to further other important ends, fundraising being one of them.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: In the aftermath of the war, American Jews were very concerned about preserving and protecting their culture and traditions, and held deep anxieties over assimilation. As many Jews moved away from majority-Jewish enclaves to suburbs where they were a minority, community leaders began to worry that there might not even be a Jewish future.
In response, experiences like sleepaway summer camps were formed. Summer camp became a rite of passage for many young Jews, and when the school year ended, thousands packed their bags and got on planes and trains to spend the hot summer months in the wilderness. In addition to typical summer camp activities like archery, swimming, and bonfires, campers were also required to attend religious services, perform songs and skits, learn about Zionism and the newly-formed state of Israel, and participate in pageants themed around the Holocaust. As the Jewish community sought to preserve its traditions, a new culture emerged.
Archival Audio – Children at Camp Massad Performing “This Land is Your Land” in Hebrew
“This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
As I went walking that ribbon of highway
And I saw above me that endless skyway
I saw below me that golden valley
This land was made for you and me
I roamed and rambled, and I’ve followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts
All around me, a voice was sounding
This land was made for you and me
There was a big, high wall there that tried to stop me
A sign was painted said ‘Private Property’
But on the backside, it didn’t say nothing
This land was made for you and me
When the sun come shining, then I was strolling
And the wheat fields waving, and the dust clouds rolling
The voice was chanting as the fog was lifting
This land was made for you and me
This land is your land, and this land is my land
From California to the New York island
From the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and me
Hasia Diner: In many of those Jewish educational programs and Jewish summer camps in the fifties—the Holocaust was performed all the time. So it’s not possible that those kids went to the summer camps and didn’t hear that stuff, didn’t participate in a Tisha B’Av pageant that deals with the Holocaust. I mean, it’s just not possible.
This is the kids who come of age in the late fifties and sixties and who become the college students, and some of them end up in the protest movements. They were raised on The Diary of Anne Frank. And, again, I remember that so well. And they’re raised on early portrayals of the Holocaust on American television. I don’t know if—they may have been allowed to stay up late enough to watch The Twilight Zone with Rod Serling, and there are many Holocaust episodes on that. So they’re getting it, not just from what their parents might be saying. They’re getting it—and maybe the parents were trying to find euphemisms or—but they’re getting it from Hebrew schools, religious schools. They’re getting it—all Jewish kids in the 1950s who went to a religious school got a magazine called The World Over. It was free. Every Thursday, it came out. And you can go through, as I did, every issue of the world over. In those years, there was never an issue in which that the Holocaust was not somehow part of a little short story, part of a little historical vignette.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: World War II and the Holocaust shaped an entire generation of American Jews, and the shadows of trauma influenced nearly every part of their postwar lives.
Hasia Diner: But to me, what was really striking was how that genera—those American Jews who witnessed from afar the Holocaust—and, now, what they often refer to as the Catastrophe—saw it as, obviously, a kind of—beyond watershed moment in Jewish history, as rattling as kind of like, my God, it could have been us because our parents or our grandparents made this decision to come to the United States; how they kept bringing it into whatever it is they produced; how they did it to, I’d say, memorialize those who were killed, to tell the American public what happened, to make sure the Americans did not lose it, to hold Germany’s feet to the fire. We haven’t talked at all about the Claims Conference, which American Jews—American Jewish organizations are, in a sense, the instigators of the Claims Conference. And so, to keep Germany’s—to make sure Germany pays up. You know, they can’t bring people back, but they can sure pay. To change America, be it civil rights, be it immigration change, and how they saw it was going to tran—how they wanted to use it to transform the Jewish world and to reinvest or to invest in Jewish education, in Jewish culture, in Jewish observ—whatever it was, they did it in the name of the Holocaust, but I see it as very sincere.
Rebecca Naomi Jones: From the American Jewish Historical Society, I’m Rebecca Naomi Jones. This episode was written by executive director Gemma R. Birnbaum. Recording, sound design, and mixing were done at Sound Lounge. Archival material is courtesy of the collections of the American Jewish Historical Society, the New York Times, and the CBS News Archive.For episode transcripts, additional resources, and links to the collections featured in this episode, visit ajhs.org/podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a rating and review, which helps others discover our series.
