Americans have been on the hunt for internal enemies across the arc of the nation’s history, a reality worth remembering as we embark on the commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the American Revolution. The identities of those suspected of undermining the nation’s essential nature and threatening its very safety have changed over time, but the crusades against them have always been there, fanning politics, shaping policies and sparking into violence with great frequency.
The Fighters for the American Way
Before our own days, as we now live through the horrors of the Trump-era with its campaigns against immigrants, Muslims, advocates of racial and economic justice, trans and nonbinary people, women, science and a depressingly longer list, our attention goes back in time to the Red Scare. That era, usually and erroneously associated with the late 1940s and 1950s, and linked to the name of Wisconsin’s senator, Joseph McCarthy, in fact extended to the years immediately following World War I and the Russian Revolution.
The Red Scare scrutinized government programs considered un-American, viewed immigrants as a problem to be solved, and called for a preservation of conventional gender roles and racial hierarchies.
Unabated from the late 1910s onward, the Red Scare raged on. It targeted political radicals, advocates for progressive causes, and those whose ideas and beliefs did not measure up to or conform to some imagined American standard of acceptability. It scrutinized government programs considered un-American, viewed immigrants as a problem to be solved, and called for a preservation of conventional gender roles and racial hierarchies.
Then, as now, public institutions and the media, abetted by politicians mostly interested in lining their own pockets and boosting their own power, turned on those who articulated ideas defined as dangerous, and who often stemmed from racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds that did not seem to fit the white Protestant ideal of American citizenship. The fighters for the American way, as they projected themselves, whether from inside or outside government, claimed the right to define civic space in their own image for the benefit of those like themselves, in ancestry and ideology.
Jewish Communal Agencies Purged Their Staffs
Where did Jews fit into this obsession with seeking out and punishing America’s internal enemies, and how did their communal agencies, institutions and organizations respond? How do answers to these questions suggest a sea change in American Jewish history?
In that earlier era, stretching across four decades, Jews had good reason to believe that they fell into the enemy category. Most Jews still had been born abroad during this age of anti-immigrant xenophobia. So many of them affiliated with the labor movement at a time when unions, in particular, found themselves in the cross-hairs of the enemy-hunters. A substantial number of Jews embraced left-leaning political positions, mostly socialism, but for a not-inconsiderable and visible number among them, communism as well. Associated with the new media of the age — movies, in particular, but also radio and television — Jews could easily be identified as the creators and purveyors of a modern vernacular culture that jarred with the small-town values held up as truly American.
It is however notable that in all the many Red Scare-era battles, Jews did not stand out as the sole objects of the hunts. They, along with so many other Americans, of a variety of backgrounds, found themselves in the cross-hairs. Jews, at the time and later commentators, have tended to define these campaigns as aimed at Jews (one might say, as Jews), but those Jews who saw themselves and were indeed vulnerable to attack shared much with others also labelled subversive and not worthy of inclusion in the nation.
Jewish communal agencies did what they could to present Jews to the American public as law-abiding, upholders of the American standard. They projected an image of the Jews as totally at home, and in sync with American values and ideals.
Nothing demonstrated this more dramatically than the ease, in the 1950s, with which they also purged their staffs of people whom they defined as harboring suspicious politics. Even before that, Jewish labor unions and the Workmen’s Circle, both leaning socialist, expelled communists from their ranks. The Anti-Defamation League, the American Jewish Congress and the American Jewish Committee, the Workmen’s Circle, the Jewish Labor Committee and more declaimed loudly that they, too, hated communism and made it clear that they did not welcome in their ranks Jews from the left. The National Community Relations Advisory Committee, an umbrella of nearly all Jewish organizations, went on record opposing the work of the Rosenberg Committee, a mostly Jewish group that decried the arrest and trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, arguing that the couple were victims of an antisemitic campaign. Jewish community councils around the country expelled from their ranks the Jewish Peoples’ Fraternal Order, the Jewish wing of the International Workers Order. The list could go on, and the pages of the American Jewish Yearbook read as hearty endorsements of the effort to root out communists from American life.
To what degree did these organizations actually partake of the anti-communist, anti-radical message of the long Red Scare, or did they rather consider it to be in the interests of the Jews to act as though they did? Some surely saw this as a way to prevent the escalation of antisemitism. Many of these bodies, in their own ways, also spoke out against the excesses of the purges and blacklists of known or suspected radicals carried out by state agencies. Whatever their motives, they did not sit back and silently watch the assaults taking place around them.
Jewish communal agencies … declaimed loudly that they, too, hated communism and made it clear that they did not welcome in their ranks Jews from the left.
The assaults of those years seem sickeningly familiar to us as we witness now all that is going on around us — the attacks on immigrants in both word and deed; gutting of programs to protect minority students; attempts, sadly successful, to control curricula; among so many other heinous, daily developments.
Suppression in the Name of Combating Antisemitism
From the perspective of American Jewish history, however, what makes this moment so different is that those who are committing those acts, harming vulnerable populations and suppressing free academic inquiry, claim that they act in order to protect Jews. In the period from the end of World War I through the 1950s, none of the Red Scare combatants articulated any concern for Jews or defined them as a group in need of defenders. They did not hold up Jews as anything better than the others whom they targeted, and indeed, often put Jews at the top of the list of those whom they believed threated the American essence. They lumped Jews in with all the enemies of true Americanism.
Today, however, those responsible for all that we, or some of us, find frightening and have launched a new scare which as yet has no label, claim to be the friends of the Jews. Particularly in the matter of education, whether K-12 or on college campuses, the forces at work, starting from the White House and then extending outward, state by state, offer a message that they are the friends of the Jews — that they and they alone are combating antisemitism, and that their actions will make Jews safer.
Much of this is being done in the name of the State of Israel. Jews, today’s enemies of diversity and open debate declare, are under attack from the left— from those, in particular, who champion the cause of Palestinians. Any discussion of the history of Palestine, or of Israel’s apartheid policies and genocidal campaigns amount to antisemitism, and Jews deserve to be sheltered from hearing such words.
Jewish communal leaders today — the leaders of large, well-heeled, respectable organizations, as well as much of the Jewish public — applaud these efforts, ironically abetting their real enemies, who, in fact, care nothing about them.
