There is a widespread belief that the American population remained indifferent to the genocide of European Jews or deliberately ignored it. Catherine Collomp shows that this is not the case by tracing the history of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), and his work to inform the United States about Nazism but also to save many Jews and trade unionists from death in France and Poland.
There is a widespread belief among some historians and the general public that the American population, including the Jewish population, remained indifferent to the genocide of European Jews during World War II, or even deliberately ignored it. Historical research on the United States during the Holocaust, popularized by the book While six million Jews were dying published in 1968 by the journalist AD Morse, described the failure of the Roosevelt administration, of American civil society, and even of American Jews, who were portrayed as divided and indifferent. The title of Morse’s book speaks for itself, and his findings have spawned a series of questions that historians continue to debate today: When did the U.S. government learn of the Final Solution? Why did Congress refuse to change the restrictive and discriminatory immigration policies then in effect in the United States? Were the State Department’s decisions motivated by anti-Semitism? Why did the Roosevelt administration wait until January 1944 to mount a rescue mission?
While Morse, and later Wyman, were primarily concerned with identifying the culprits, others, such as Feingold, Breitman, Kraut, and Lichtman, have sought to contextualize the American response to the Holocaust and explain what stood in the way of a rescue mission. Even today, the issue is not settled: most historians agree on the main facts of the story but give different interpretations. Thus this field of historical research, although rich and instructive, often ends up being reduced to a debate between those who see the glass as half empty and those who see it as half full.
The mobilization of the Jewish Labor Committee
The question of “what should have happened” in the political sphere has until recently eclipsed the more pragmatic question of “what actually happened.” American Jews, divided by class, language, and ideological conflicts, were unable to form a united front. They could not prevent the massacre of six million Jews on European soil. But they actively tried to oppose it and seek solutions both politically and in civil society. Yet there is very little work on these civic mobilizations on behalf of American Jews.
This is why Catherine Collomp’s latest work, Resisting Nazism, the Jewish Labor Committee, New York, 1934-1945is a valuable contribution to the history of the Second World War. The book traces in six chapters the creation of the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) in New York in 1934, recounts his efforts to inform the American public about Nazism and his support for rescue missions and resistance movements in France and Poland. A specialist in the labor movement in the United States, Collomp provides a fascinating social and transnational history of the response of American and European labor movements to the Third Reich. His meticulously researched book will be of interest to scholars and students of the rescue missions of Jews during the Holocaust as well as to those interested in labor movements and socialism during World War II.
The importance of mobilizing the JLC not only because of the financial support it gave to the resistance movements in France and Poland, and because of the number of individuals it helped save during the Second World War, but also because of the loyal ties it maintained with the Bund on the one hand and the workers’ movement on the other, which allowed for an unexpected collaboration. As the first chapter explains, the leaders of the JLCincluding David Dubinsky, director of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGW) and Baruch Charney Vladeck, administrative director of the Yiddish newspaper The Jewish Daily Forwardcame from the specific political tradition of the Bund. Neither communist nor Zionist, the Bundist movement had been founded in Vilnius (now Lithuania) in 1897, before spreading to the Russian Settlement Zone, where it acted as both a trade union for Jewish workers and a socialist party. The Bundists fought for the recognition of Jews and Yiddish in the broader workers’ movement. After their role in the 1905 revolution, but especially after that of 1917 – because they rejected communism – they were forced to go underground. Thus, Dubinksy and Vladeck had both fled Eastern Europe, but had often returned to Europe in the 1930s. Back in the United States, where they were seen as credible messengers, they described to the American labor movement the increasing persecution by the Nazis.
However, it was difficult to convince the American labor movement, embodied by the American Federation of Labor, AFL) and then after 1938 also by the Congress of Industrial Organizations, to join the fight against Nazism. Since the First World War, a growing isolationist movement had been demanding a toughening of migration policies. The “quota system”, created in 1921 and reinforced in 1924, severely limited the immigration of Southern and Eastern Europeans, to block the arrival of non-Protestant populations. TheAFL supported these immigration restrictions, which she saw as a way to improve working conditions in the United States. Even though theAFL had condemned Nazism and the persecution of workers’ leaders in 1933, and had even organised a boycott of German products, its isolationism prevented it from drawing closer to the European workers’ movement.
Trade union solidarity, boycott and support for armed resistance
THE JLC made the pragmatic decision not to try to change U.S. immigration policies. But he pushed theAFL to mobilize to save the European labor leaders. As Chapter Two shows, the JLC had, through his Bundist and international networks, a very clear vision of those, among the European union leaders, who were running the greatest risks. JLC therefore set out to save the European workers’ movement by helping its leaders, many of whom were Jewish, to escape. Chapter four analyses how the JLCsupported by theAFLobtained temporary emergency visas from the State Department, despite immigration restrictions, and helped nearly 1,500 union leaders and their families emigrate to the United States between 1940 and 1942. Since the Nazi occupation, France, where many persecuted political activists had sought refuge, had become a death trap. Frank Bohn, working closely with Varian Fry’s Emergency Rescue Committee, evacuated individuals who appeared on the list drawn up by the JLC/AFL. THE JLC was also concerned about the fate of the Bundist leaders, trapped in what had become Soviet Lithuania in 1940. Here again, the JLC fought to obtain emergency visas and, thanks to Sempo Sugihara, the Japanese ambassador in Kovno, some received visas for Japan, from where they were able to return to the United States across the Pacific.
THE JLC also operated on US territory, as Collomp shows in chapter three. As theAFLTHE JLC had joined the movement to boycott German goods in 1935, forming the Joint Boycott Council with another American Jewish organization, the American Jewish Congress. The latter’s membership was largely working-class and Yiddish-speaking, making the two organizations natural allies, even if they disagreed on the issue of Zionism. Together, these organizations managed to draw thousands of newly naturalized American Jews to meetings where they called for an aggressive boycott and the use of “frontal” tactics that shocked the much more discreet elite American Jewish organizations.
In 1936, for example, to protest against the Berlin Olympic Games, the JLC organized a two-day Counter-Olympics in New York City that attracted over 20,000 spectators. Collomp’s study shows that there was a citizen protest movement among a portion of the American Jewish population. But even though she takes the time to situate the JLC In the heterogeneous constellation of the “American Jewish Community,” she is less interested in studying the relationships between the different Jewish organizations than in studying the ins and outs of the American and European labor movements.
Because these are the links of the JLC with the labor movement that gave rise to the most unexpected dimension of its work in Europe. Chapter five describes in detail how the American Jewish organization supported the Bundist Jewish resistance in France, but also financed the French socialists and labor movement – for example through the funding of the Popularthe underground newspaper of the SFIO.
The solidarity of the JLC could therefore take many forms, and was not reserved for Jews. However, Collomp shows, in the last chapter, how its leaders were viscerally attached to saving lives in Poland. In collaboration with the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the JLC sent funds for humanitarian aid. It also financed armed resistance and supported Jewish and non-Jewish resistance networks.
Collomp’s approach allows us to rethink the response of American Jews to the Holocaust from the “bottom up,” showing how a part of this population mobilized, not only in the name of ethno-religious solidarity, but also in the name of European socialist and labor movements. By studying in detail the role of an American Jewish organization in Europe during the Second World War, the book “internationalizes” American history. It would therefore be reductive to consider it solely as a contribution to “American Jewish history” or “Holocaust studies.” Other scholars might have seen in the book JLC an example of Jewish solidarity – and would have missed an essential dimension of his action. Because it is indeed a story of American Jewish resistance – but it would be wrong to consider it only in that way.