4

CONFRONTING BIASED ATTITUDES

It has been noted that in times of war, Jewish soldiers suffer in double measure: as citizens and as Jews.¹ A GI expressed his frustration thus: “Many of the boys still think of Jews as aliens, that the war is being fought to save ‘Jewish kikes.’”² Drawing on soldiers’ narratives, later writings, and oral history, this chapter aims to show how servicemen—especially those in combat units—confronted anti-Jewish attitudes in the military. It unveils their private struggles against anti-Jewish hostility and reveals how Zionist aspirations resonated with GIs who became aware of the large-scale extermination of the Jews. For some, the concept of a Jewish homeland in Palestine acquired significance—to which the miracle of Israel reborn and immediately threatened on May 14, 1948, lent extra weight. Historian Leonard Dinnerstein analyzes the deep insecurity still felt by American Jews after the Depression years: “Ironically, although the depression led to increased manifestations of antisemitism, the return of prosperity during World War II did not mitigate its effects.”³

On this unfolding spiritual journey, soldiers’ intimate fight for acceptance and recognition challenges the commonly held notion that the Jewish experience during World War II was mostly one of victimization. How did Jewish GIs overcome the stigma of humiliation? There were various responses to antisemitic slurs.

BEING THREE TIMES AS GOOD JUST TO BE EVEN

Captain Jerry Yellin’s biography on the website Spiritof45.org describes his war achievements and dedication to the United States: “I served in World War II as a P51 fighter pilot flying escort and strafing missions from the island of Iwo Jima over Japan. On August 14, 1945, as celebrations of joy and relief were breaking out all over America at the news that the war was ended, I was flying the last combat mission over the Japanese island of Honshu.”⁴ On one of his last speaking engagements on October 25, 2018, at the National Museum of American Jewish History in Washington, DC, he revealed stories related to his war experiences as a Jew. Jerry Yellin recalled that his mother persuaded him to have a bar mitzvah despite him not wanting one, perhaps to avoid being different from his non-Jewish friends. Around that time, swastikas were painted on his home—and from then on, etched in his mind. He felt isolated from his schoolmates, and the feeling of rejection fueled his desire to become “the best fighter pilot.” But just as in civil life, when he enlisted after the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was made to feel his difference, especially when training with the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron: “Twenty-eight guys roomed with other pilots and I was a Jewish guy and they knew that and I roomed with Marvin Kern and Phil Janoski who were the Intelligence Division of the 78th Fighter Squadron. I was separated because of my religion. I was not accepted as a fighter pilot until I flew and like the Tuskegee Airmen, the black guys who had to be three times as good, just to be even, I had to be three times as good.”⁵

In his memoirs, Jerry Yellin expressed the same eagerness to fight in the Pacific as his fellow non-Jewish fighters “to repay the Japanese for what they had done to our Navy at Pearl Harbor”: “On March 7, 1945, seventy-two years from the very day that I write these words, I sat in the cockpit of a P51-D Mustang fighter plane, flying at ten thousand feet above the western Pacific, cutting a northerly course through the sunny afternoon sky toward the red-hot island of Iwo Jima, where sixty-seven thousand American Marines were still locked in battle with thousands of Japanese troops.”⁶ Like other pilots, some of whom were in their teens, he knew their mission was a deadly one. He knew that “they were entrusted alone in the cockpit of a P-51 by their country.” As volunteers in the Army Air Forces, they were prepared to sacrifice their lives—in the Army Air Forces, no one was drafted. The spirit of sacrifice, he thought, had to be enough to cement a bond between pilots. Twenty-year-old Jerry could not yet grasp the extent of pain he would feel after losing one of his five squadron buddies flying over Hawaii, training for the missions off Iwo Jima with the Seventy-Eighth Fighter Squadron. It hurt even more than to be reminded he was a Jew, for religion had not mattered much to him so far. He would later come to understand the bond of cultural heritage, though his Jewishness first stamped him with an indelible stigma: “I was also the same Jewish kid who had later experienced my first taste of an unfathomable prejudice sweeping the world called anti-Semitism, from some of those same friends, a bitter pill that I did not understand.”⁷

Would he always have to stick with his own kind? He chose to take under his wing a nineteen-year-old pilot, the youngest son of ten children of poor immigrant parents from Poland. For First Lieutenant Philip Schlamberg, his duty was to serve his country. He felt he had to show what sons of Jewish immigrants from the poor section of Coney Island were capable of doing in gratitude to their host country. Five months and eight days after their first flight to Iwo Jima, six days after President Harry Truman ordered the dropping of the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki to stop a war that continued to take the lives of thousands of American soldiers, they flew a mission they hoped would be unnecessary. The Japanese were still refusing to surrender. The Seventy-Eighth Squadron would have to take to Japanese skies again. On the morning of August 15, 1945, Philip confided to Jerry his premonition that he would die on that mission. Jerry knew that pilots’ sense of their coming death was often accurate, so he talked to their commanding officer. This is Yellin’s version of this significant event, when Major Jim Tapp agreed to “grounding Phil for the flight” and finding a substitute wingman.

But Phil would have none of it. He was determined to fly the mission, premonition, or no premonition.

It happened shortly after we had attacked an airfield over Tokyo just after noon. We had avoided being hit by antiaircraft fire up to that point, but I was worried about Phil. I told him to stay tight on my wing, and that he would be okay. And he had done just that. We hit the field, and then climbed into a cloud embankment, with Phil flying tight in beside me. When I emerged from the clouds a few minutes later, Phil was gone. I never saw him again.⁸

Philip Schlamberg proved that he would entertain no excuses whatsoever to avoid sacrificing his life for the United States. The Jewish kid repaid his country for its hospitality and died as an American officer. To those who wondered how he had managed to get into the air force at such a young age, some seventy years later Captain Yellin provided an answer—that unarguable excellence was the best road to acceptance for Jews and immigrants: “The valedictorian of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, Phil’s service-entrance test scores were among the very highest in the history of the Army.”⁹

These examples indicate to what extent demonstrating bravery and excellence was a response to pervasive antisemitic slurs in the military. That was also the case in American society at large, yet a wide range of strategies to confront anti-Jewish hostility were adopted.

FROM FISTS TO SILENT TACTICS

In Algeria, Burton Roberts, a Jewish soldier termed “a replacement” in the infantry, believed fellow soldiers equated Jews with cowards because they had never met any. He admitted that this insult resulted in fights.¹⁰ Noted American columnist Art Buchwald also responded with his fists, as did numerous other Jewish GIs.¹¹ Buchwald’s wry sense of humor considerably helped him deal with hostility, alleviating the frustration others experienced. Some were shocked by the visceral hatred and Christian hostility against Jews and remained silent. At times, they regretted not having talked or fought back to defend their self-respect.¹²

David Macarov, a Jewish serviceman from Georgia, grew up in the shadow of the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank outside Atlanta, the town in which he lived. It was the first lynching of a Jew in the United States. Leo Frank was unjustly accused of having murdered a young girl who worked in the factory he headed. Although a jury influenced by anti-Jewish hostility found him guilty, the judge revised the sentence, having found the evidence not convincing enough. So did the governor of Georgia, who commuted Frank’s death sentence to life imprisonment. But citizens—filled with rage and stirred by a newspaper editor—broke into the jail, violently dragged out thirty-year-old Leo Frank, and lynched him. The young girl’s murderer was found after his death. This most dramatic antisemitic incident in American history remained etched in David Macarov’s mind.¹³ Sent to India during World War II, he was convinced of the need for a Jewish homeland. He immigrated to mandatory Palestine with his American wife, Frieda, in 1947 and fought in the War of Independence in 1948 as a major overseeing coded communications for the Israel Air Force.¹⁴ Writing his memoirs as a veteran, Macarov confided that anti-Jewish hostility in the American military during the war was pervasive and nestled within seemingly innocuous jokes—when it was not openly expressed in antisemitic cartoons.¹⁵

There was the usual amount of endemic anti-Semitism on the base. . . . For example, at an entertainment night, one of the soldier-entertainers was telling jokes, and among others he told of Abie coming home from work and telling his son, who was standing on the top step, to jump into his arms. The son was hesitant, but Abie was insistent, and when the son finally jumped Abie stepped aside. As the son looked up from the pavement, broken and bleeding, Abie said, “Let that be a lesson to you. Never trust a Jew.” The entertainer waited for the laughter to subside, and then noticed some of us glancing at one another. He stopped and said, “If there are any Jews here, I didn’t mean you, of course. It is just a joke.” And that was the way he saw it.

On the other hand, the sergeant in charge of the motor pool had papered his office with crude anti-Semitic cartoons and sayings, and every time we had to get the vehicle for Friday services, he made sure we all had to walk through the office while he sat there grinning. I eventually complained to the chaplain, but nothing happened.¹⁶

Anti-Jewish cartoons and jokes contributed to a trivialization of anti-Jewish attitudes. Yet, during the war years, a new acceptance of Judaism within the military and legitimation of Jewish religious services gradually transformed Judaism from a suspicious anomaly to one of America’s three main faiths. As worshiping together was encouraged, and since Christian chaplains were entitled to deliver sermons for religious services or conduct them in the absence of a Jewish chaplain, Jewish public worship was lent more weight.¹⁷

MAINTAINING A STRONG JEWISH IDENTITY

Encountering Jews abroad reinforced the Jewish identity of some GIs, as will be seen in the next chapter. A sense of belonging to the Jewish people, later termed “Jewish peoplehood,” was emerging. Religious observance springing from a religious background and a sprinkling of knowledge of Jewish culture helped cope with anti-Jewish slurs. It forged a positive Jewish identity endowed with meaning that could act as a shield against anti-Jewish hostility. Sergeant Naurice Rosen, for instance, a proud Jew and the son of one of the founders of the Jewish community in Camden, New Jersey, was interested in Jewish culture. The local Jewish newspaper, the Voice, published a column in several issues under the heading “With Our Men in Uniform.” Writing from “somewhere in Italy” (to comply with censorship), Sergeant Rosen of the Eighty-Sixth Bombardment Group explained his reaction to several issues of the Voice. The following is an excerpt from the letter he sent to the newspaper, published on February 11, 1944, in which he argued that although he and his fellow soldiers were fighting antisemitism abroad, the fight did not yet entail a victory over prejudice.

No fault of yours but The Voice finally caught up with us. It trailed me through North Africa, Sicily, and now Italy. Nevertheless, no matter what dated editions I am now receiving, a certain proudness overcomes me in reading such subjects of my race [sic] both politically and socially.

My international knowledge of the Jew is very limited except for the suffering, torture, and murder of our innocent people in Nazi-occupied countries. I am aware and quite confused by the anti-semitism existing in our United Nations [Allies] today. Aren’t we fighting for the FREEDOM OF RELIGION AND FREEDOM FROM FEAR or am I misinterpreting the freedom of our democracy?

A reply to his letter appeared in the Voice a month later, on March 10. The author of the column first apologized for not being able to offer “real help” on the issue. He went on to encourage soldiers on the front to continue writing to the newspaper. The columnist tried to instill hope by arguing that “our leaders in the great war are formulating plans for a better world to which he [Sergeant Rosen] and his comrades can return in peace.” He acknowledged the absurdity with which Jewish soldiers were faced: they could encounter, back home, the same religious and ethnic intolerance they were risking their lives to uproot. To Rosen’s letter, the author of the response offered hope for persecuted Jews in the world: “Jewish leaders have constantly urged the United Nations to recognize that justice to the Jew must be a declared objective of this war. That there is a general awakening to this is witnessed by the Committee Against Anti-Semitism, formed by Justice Murphy, the President’s creation of the War Refugee Board, and the Bi-Partisan Resolutions introduced into the Congress for the creation of a Jewish Commonwealth in Palestine.”¹⁸

In the response Sergeant Rosen received, a link was suggested between the nature of his patriotic engagement and the efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine, while Britain had been entrusted with a mandate over Palestine by the League of Nations. A tree would be planted in the Jewish homeland in honor of Jewish servicemen and servicewomen like him.¹⁹ Zionism was not Rosen’s stance or that of his parents, but the answer he received stirred his reflection. Some seventy years later, Sergeant Rosen’s son argued that “the ultimate goal” of his father had been “to build strong Jewish communities in the United States” in which Jews would no longer feel like underdogs.²⁰ Traditions of tolerance in the United States have lessened the impact of anti-Jewish hostility in times of prosperity, although contradictory trends in American society add to the complexity of the bias against Jews. How can we understand the receptivity of a segment of American society to the similitudes between Zionist aspirations and American ideals? The emergence of American Zionism demonstrated the interaction between images of the Land of Israel and images of America among American Jews. These representations embraced cherished ideals of democracy, freedom, social justice, and pluralism. Before its gradual transformation from an ideal espoused mainly by immigrants to a mainstream American Jewish movement, Zionism gave hope to American Jews: “The [Zionist] movement served as a lens through which American Jews viewed nascent Palestinian and American society as many thought it ought to be: full of promise and opportunity, industrious and expansive, and not least of all, capable of elevating the human condition.”²¹

An affinity to Zionism could result from experiences during World War II, as case studies show. Confrontation with extermination camps triggered such responses from American Jewish servicemen and servicewomen. The systematic extermination of Jews was the epitome of antisemitism. Maurice Paper, from Baltimore, enlisted in the army in 1942 and, after a high score on the army’s IQ test, entered an officer’s school. By the age of twenty, he was a second lieutenant and combat engineer in North Africa, Italy, and Germany. He received a Bronze Star for helping members of the French Maquis (guerrilla resistance fighters) in the French Riviera destroy two bridges to prevent the Germans from advancing. The American officer was surprised to discover that all the resistance fighters he met in this part of France were Jews of Polish origin who spoke Yiddish with him. Maurice Paper was promoted to the rank of captain in 1943. General Eisenhower dispatched him to Dachau on April 29, 1945, because of his knowledge of Yiddish. Though the death camps were not military objectives, he was instructed to gain the trust of Jewish survivors. This is how he recounted his encounter with Nazi barbary:

They found it hard to believe that they lived, at least they lived. . . . I got very sad over all of this. I told them we were going to do what we could, to have faith, and that they would all be set free with identity papers.

I became a Zionist because I realized that there was no other answer for the Jewish people. Because of my war experiences I saw what happened to a people, a whole people.²²

In fact, Maurice Paper’s overwhelming experience strengthened his vision of Zion as a homeland for uprooted Jews. His vision of Zion was first conveyed through his study of Hebrew as a child in a Hebrew school in Baltimore. Although from a different background, another serviceman came to the same conclusion following his encounter with Nazi extermination camps. Born in 1922, Paul Shulman grew up in New York in a Zionist family close to the legendary Henrietta Szold, the founder of Hadassah, a women’s Zionist organization. He graduated from the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis during the war. Sent to the Pacific theater, he was the deputy commander of a destroyer. He served on the USS Hunt, which faced both a typhoon and kamikaze bombing.²³ At war’s end, the naval hero helped smuggle Holocaust survivors from Europe to the Jewish homeland in Palestine. Maurice Paper belonged to a network of volunteers from the United States and Canada called Machal (a Hebrew acronym for “volunteers from abroad”). Paul Shulman exemplified selflessness and bravery in the service of his country, not ignoring the responsibility he had as a Jew to help Jewish displaced persons. All the American servicemen who did not ignore their responsibility, he commented, “gave their time and their will, their strength and their determination . . . without pay, without fanfare, without reward or praise, and were undeterred by the risks of their lives.”²⁴ Their bravery conveyed a sense of responsibility as representatives of the Jewish people.

SETTING AN EXAMPLE OF EXTREME BRAVERY

For many survivors of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, the Jewish homeland in Palestine meant the end of humiliation, degradation, and persecution. Although not drawn to Zionism by his background, Colonel David Daniel Marcus understood the necessity for a viable Jewish state in the context of the extermination of European Jews. Born in February 1901 in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, he was the son of immigrant Jewish parents from Romania. The fifth of six children whose father died prematurely, he was impressed by his older brother Michael, whom he admired for his athletic body and as a leader of a self-defense group formed to protect elderly and weak Jews. He promptly understood the necessity of practicing athletics, embracing ideals of American masculinity while excelling as a student. It was no wonder he lived up to the challenge of entering West Point, the prestigious military academy and bastion where anti-Jewish attitudes (exemplified by General Patton) were ingrained among high-ranking officers, reflecting the prejudice omnipresent in wider civil society.²⁵ Historian Derek Penslar thus interprets Marcus’s challenge: “This decision corresponded to Marcus’ ambition and determination not merely to Americanize but to penetrate the bastion of the United States’ warrior elite, a caste that historically had had few Jewish members.”²⁶

For those who met him, David Daniel Marcus was a man who provoked admiration.²⁷ They reported that “they could not keep up with him,” that he would “accomplish in five minutes what it would take others a week to do.”²⁸ He would not only quote Shakespeare, Keats, and the Old Testament but would also tap dance, sing in a baritone voice, pray, and never miss physical exercise. A boxer, an energetic man and cheerful fellow who liked to drink, he shared some of the characteristics often attributed to Irish masculinity, according to those who knew him.²⁹ As legal officer, he became judge advocate of his army national guard unit, the Twenty-Seventh Infantry Division. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Marcus was sent to Hawaii with the Twenty-Seventh Division, where he organized and commanded a ranger combat training school. The school trained soldiers in techniques of unarmed defense combat—perhaps inspired by his brother’s knowledge and command of self-defense. The aim was to fight Japanese infiltration strategies. Instead of continuing in a field command, he was sent to Washington in 1943 and appointed to the Civil Affairs Division. He participated in American delegations to the conferences at Cairo, Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam. All the while, Marcus sought out physical challenges, perhaps to give an example of what a Jewish son of immigrants whose mother clung to the Yiddish language could do out of patriotism and gratitude for the country that opened its doors to his family.

Although he was not trained as a parachutist, Marcus insisted on participating in the dangerous Operation Overlord and parachuted into Normandy on D-Day with the first wave of General Maxwell Taylor’s 101st Airborne Division. He fought for a week, taking informal command of paratroopers after V-E Day. General Lucius Clay invited Marcus to join his staff in the American zone of occupation in Germany, where he was to take care of displaced persons, among them destitute Jewish survivors he instilled with hope. An army colonel, Marcus was one of the main architects of the United States military’s World War II civil affairs policies. His task included organizing war crimes trials in Germany and in Japan. Blessed with a phenomenal memory, Marcus could do “the work of five people,” as his secretaries reported. Most of all, he lived by the code with which he had been imbued at West Point: “duty, honor, and country.”³⁰ Inspired by American ideals and the moral obligation to provide a home for Holocaust survivors—who could not wait for a visa that would not come to displaced persons camps in Germany, Austria, and Italy—he heroically participated in the 1948 War of Independence as Israel’s first general (Aluf in Hebrew). The “moral obligation” to establish a “refuge” for displaced persons had been voiced by President Harry S. Truman, who referred to the postwar problem as a “world tragedy.” Marcus understood the depth of the problem and immediately grasped the fact that the Jewish displaced persons issue could not be satisfactorily solved without the emergence of a Jewish state. The American serviceman was killed by friendly fire at his post in the hills of Jerusalem on June 10, 1948. He remained the best-known Machal soldier. The commitment to Israel’s fight for freedom exemplified by Marcus was recognized by the United States Military Academy. In the West Point Cemetery, the headstone of the only serviceman interred there who fell while fighting for another country proclaims him “A Soldier for All Humanity.” Through bravery and dedication to one’s country and American values even abroad, the Jewish plight acquired universalistic overtones—with a potential to overrun prejudice.³¹

THE “GOOD WAR” AND ITS MULTIPLE IMPLICATIONS

The notion of World War II as “a good war” began in response to the “day of infamy,” when Japan attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor, destroying ships and aircraft. The revelation of the extent of the slaughter in Europe triggered by anti-Jewish hostility and racial discrimination only reinforced the motivation of Jewish American servicemen and women “to do the job” during World War II. The US Army Signal Corps prepared and distributed This Is Why We Fight, a news map evincing Nazi atrocities encountered by American troops in Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald, on April 4, 1945, where no inmate was found alive. Until this publication, troops did not grasp that “atrocity stories” were not rumors. General Eisenhower, the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe, visited the camp on April 12 and instructed that a visit would be compulsory for American troops in the area.³² This Is Why We Fight contains the following unequivocal words.

Now, we’ve SEEN it. This is what fascism “New Order” brought to millions in Europe—death by torture, starvation, flogging, and every fiendish method the twisted German mind could devise.

Not so long ago, some of us were saying “the Germans are really nice people, pretty much like us—decent, clean, kindly at heart.”

These are the sights—photographed by Signal Corps cameramen that greeted our soldiers who over-ran German concentration camps. This is what General Eisenhower wanted our congressmen and newspaper editors to come and see.

Take a good look and remember.³³

Many non-Jewish soldiers were overwhelmed and traumatized by the extent of Nazi brutality. Others volunteered in the Machal to fight in Israel’s War of Independence. None who witnessed these horrors remained indifferent. Morris Eisenstein, who joined the Forty-Second Infantry (Rainbow) Division as a corporal before being promoted a sergeant in charge of a heavy weapons platoon, saw combat in southern France, Germany, and Austria. On entering Dachau with his unit, he and his fellow soldiers were struck by a horrible sight: “The first thing we saw was a railroad siding with 36 box cars loaded with bodies in various stages of decomposition, both living and dying. . . . How did my comrades feel about what they saw? The truth was they were more upset than I was.”³⁴ Why was Eisenstein able to bear the shock of that brutal revelation better than his non-Jewish fellows? It may be that because he was born in Poland, news of the sordid fate of European Jews—and probably his own family—had already reached him. Thus, his fight against Hitler was more personal; the serviceman knew about murderous pogroms against the Jews in Poland and the extent of Jew-hatred. Sergeant Morris Eisenstein was awarded two Silver Stars and three Bronze Stars for heroism in battle.³⁵ In his own way, he fought the stereotype of the cowardly Jewish soldier who dodges military service or finds safer units. African American soldiers in the Black Panthers of the 761st Tank Battalion who joined the liberation of Dachau and Buchenwald also fought on two fronts, achieving belated recognition.³⁶ Sergeant Leon Bass, one of the African American soldiers who liberated Buchenwald, discovered the outcome of racial hatred of the Jews: “I came into that camp an angry black soldier. Angry at my country and justifiably so. Angry because they were treating me as though I was not good enough. But [that day] I came to the realization that human suffering is not relegated to me and mine. I now knew that human suffering could touch us all. . . . [What I saw] in Buchenwald was the face of evil. . . . It was racism.”³⁷

What was at the source of the insult “nigger lover” hurled at Jews? Was it the empathy that some Jews felt for African Americans, who were also being discriminated against? Was it their both being unwanted underdogs? A Jewish servicewoman in the WAC mentioned that each time a sergeant passed her desk he would mumble: “You can’t beat the niggers or the Jews.”³⁸ American army veteran Alan Moskin, who took part in the liberation of the Gunskirchen concentration camp in Austria, admitted in an interview that these words pronounced as an insult affected him.³⁹ Many American chaplains, like Abraham Klausner, saw in the concentration and extermination camps what Jew hatred could lead to. In his memoirs, Klausner insisted on the need to encourage and even force Jews who languished in displaced persons camps to immigrate to the Jewish homeland of Palestine. His stance was firm, although the British drastically limited entrance of Jewish refugees by intercepting their vessels and deporting the displaced persons to other detention camps in Cyprus or Atlit, near Haifa.⁴⁰

Numerous American chaplains encouraged Jewish displaced persons to stand up for their right to start a new life in Palestine and flee from a bloody Europe where their families had been massacred. Although American chaplains risked court-martial, they strove to provide food and supplies to survivors with the help of Jewish soldiers in occupied Germany and Austria.⁴¹ They also collected weapons for the underground Jewish army in Palestine, the Palmah, elite force of the Haganah. Former Jewish GIs and some of their non-Jewish buddies helped smuggle Jewish displaced persons across the Mediterranean Sea.⁴² It may be argued that in the war’s aftermath, the unofficial collaboration of the American army with helpful Jewish chaplains and soldiers balances the picture of pervasive anti-Jewish attitudes in the military.⁴³ A strong Jewish identity, whether grounded in Zionist aspirations expressed after the Holocaust, a religious background, spiritual awareness, or a knowledge of Jewish culture, could foster respect.

INSPIRING RESPECT FOR JEWISHNESS

Years later, Jewish servicemen expressed perceptions of Zionist aspirations as the hope of a return to Zion that empowered them both as Americans and as Jews. Former naval officer Herman Wouk, who served from 1941 to 1949, inherited Zionism and Orthodoxy from his father, as expressed in his book Sailor and Fiddler: Reflections of a 100-Year-Old Author: “Yiddish was not a language I had to learn; rather an ambiance absorbed in infancy. Reading Shalom Aleichem today, I hear in his warm clear prose my father’s Friday-night voice—the lover of Jewish characters and traditions, the Zionist, the unshakable optimist, the naive American patriot who freed himself from czarist Russia. ‘If you ever get called into the army,’ Papa once said, ‘I’ll come and wash the floor of your barracks.’”⁴⁴ American Zionists did not reject “the New World,” an act that would imply negation of the American diaspora. This is one reason why the synthesis of Jewish idealism and American progressivism was possible in the United States.

In his nonfiction book This Is My God, prize-winning author Herman Wouk wrote a dedication to his grandfather Mendel Leib Levine, “rabbi in Minsk, New York, and Tel Aviv,” who ended “his lifetime of ninety-four years” in the “reborn land of Israel.”⁴⁵ Wouk did not make a similar move, although he visited the land of his forefathers several times, and one of his sons chose to live there.⁴⁶ In the United States Naval Reserve, he participated in several invasions of the Pacific Islands aboard a minesweeper. The talented writer grew up in the Bronx and graduated from Columbia University before writing as a “gagman” for comedian Fred Allen’s popular radio show. In This Is My God, he pointed out that even in the Pacific Islands, he had managed to observe the same ritual that he, his father, and his grandfather practiced on the solemn Day of Atonement, that is, reading a special, meaningful portion of the Scriptures: “To this day my brother and I read the Book of Jonah at Yom Kippur services wherever we can. We have done so in places as far apart as Chicago, Hawaii, and Okinawa.”⁴⁷

This example reminds us that in World War II, the religious cooperation of chaplains fostered by the American military made it possible for observant Jews to reconcile religious tenets with military duty. Military constraints and the various theaters of war entailed new, creative forms of religious expression.⁴⁸ In a report about the essays collected by the YIVO Institute of Jewish Research in 1946, Moses Kligsberg, a member of the institute, aptly noted that the GIs who “accept their Jewishness as a positive possession” described antisemitic incidents with more distancing than those who perceived Jewishness as a burden.⁴⁹ Zionists who had been members of youth movements as teenagers or whose parents were Zionists, like Herman Wouk, fall into the category of those who accept their Jewishness as a positive possession. Their strong Jewish identity seemed to protect them against anti-Jewish slurs. While interest and hope in Zionism provided a response to anti-Jewish hostility, open confrontation was another response. As noted above, famous American columnist Art Buchwald responded with his fists, as did numerous GIs.⁵⁰ This choice inspired respect as an expression of American masculinity.

Zionism included an image of the “muscular Jew,” proud, upright, and physically trained, that ran counter to the negative perception of a physically weak Jew. Through the lens of Zionism, the notion of Jewish masculinity evolved. It bore the memory of the heroic image of Jews at the time of the Maccabees and Bar Kokhba. Such inspiring representations were vital at a time when Jewish Americans engaged in combat. When they enlisted, Jewish servicemen and women had fresh in their minds how they were rejected by their schoolmates once the teacher had pointed out their difference. Army nurse Mimi Rivkin explained in an interview that a classmate had refused to play with her once he learned she was Jewish.⁵¹ The perception of the Jew as the “other” continued in the military, a bastion where officers traditionally thought that Jews avoided combat and were poor military material. Researching the topic, historian Joseph Bendersky has found that in the 1920s, American culture did not perceive Jews as soldiers. They were seen as undesirables who did not melt in the melting pot, and these prejudiced views persisted throughout World War II.⁵² In the 1940s, the American Jewish community was far from homogeneous. It comprised religious and secular Jews, socialists, communists, Zionists, and a few pacifists, like Reform Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn, who later enlisted and was sent overseas as a chaplain. It is a well-known fact among those versed in World War II history that Gittelsohn was prevented from delivering the sermon he had prepared for the dedication of the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery on Iwo Jima. Was the reason anti-Jewish prejudice? A number of Christian chaplains did not agree with his liberal politics, which included support of African American servicemen. Could such a stance have disrupted a shared white American identity? Professor of Jewish history Marc Saperstein notes that the cemetery Gittelsohn described and fleshed out in his powerful sermon exemplified “the ideal of how American society should be.”⁵³

Under the stress of rejection or persecution, some Jewish GIs found refuge among other Jews, which also reinforced their faith.⁵⁴ The legitimation of Judaism eased this return to the faith of their ancestors. Some soldiers joined services as a response to anti-Jewish prejudice, while others discovered new religious meaning in services.⁵⁵

Reflecting on the three main faiths whose members served in the American military in World War II, Historian Kevin Walters establishes the following distinction: “Uniquely, however, Jewish identity consisted of both strong cultural and religious aspects that were often difficult to differentiate. At the same time, anti-Semitic attitudes often compressed these distinctions. The experience of overt anti-Semitism challenged the self-perceptions of many Jewish soldiers and sailors.” He provides the example of medic Melvin Preston, who “became a Jew in faith” after experiencing a battlefield Rosh Hashanah service in France.⁵⁶ Beyond spiritual experiences, religious practice empowered Jewish servicemen. Innovative frameworks of legitimized religious observance reduced the sting of religious discrimination tinted with xenophobia. Various other personal attitudes confronting anti-Jewish bias ranged from not advertising one’s Jewishness to regretting not having fought back.⁵⁷

PHYSICAL FORCE AS A DETERRENT AGAINST ANTI-JEWISH HOSTILITY?

To fathom the range of emotions that touched individual soldiers, their voices need to be heard. Infantry soldier Ernest Stock was reluctant to use his fists when antisemitic slurs became too harsh too bear. One day, a soldier in his unit crossed a line, proclaiming that “once the war ended . . . he would take care of all the Jews in South River.” The bigoted serviceman from New Jersey did not “let a day pass without trying to injure my pride and sensitivity,” Stock admitted. Although Stock recoiled from physical violence, included in the soldiers’ daily practice was “dirty fighting,” which they were told was “an indispensable weapon of the infantry man.” Not surprisingly, it was in one such setting that their antagonism found full expression and resolution.

The fight lasted until one of the fighters signified his desire to give up by tapping with his hand on the ground, usually forced to do so because his foe had him by the throat. . . . For the first time I felt capable of prowess which I had never suspected in me. The rest of the men circled around us, and suddenly I became aware that they were rooting for me. They had known about the undercurrent of personal animosity which made our struggle such a bitter one, they had not expected that I would be a match to my opponent, and when they saw me put a good fight, their sense of sportsmanship and fair play made them cheer for me.

When it was all over—the sergeant had finally declared the fight a draw—they came to pat me on the shoulder and shake hands with me, not only my friends but even those whom I had thought my enemies.⁵⁸

If the fight won him the camaraderie of his fellow infantrymen, did his show of physical force win the respect of his prejudiced opponent? Ernest Stock said that “he regarded me with a kind of distrustful respect and refrained from making remarks about Jews.” To conclude his reflection about the life-changing experience, he added with poise and pride: “I had learned something about the necessity of physical force.”⁵⁹

Stock had paid the price to learn more about the American ideal of masculinity. Born in 1924 in Frankfurt-am-Main, Ernest was sixteen when he came to the United States as an immigrant in July 1940, “after a turbulent flight from the Nazis which took me from my native Germany to France and later to Spain and Portugal.” He had no idea that he would go back to Europe as an infantryman a couple of years later; his only desire was to settle down after so many tribulations as a German refugee. When learning about the soldier’s past, one cannot help but be impressed by his resilience and efforts to shift the emphasis in his identity from German to Jewish, and then from Jewish to American.⁶⁰ Such drastic uprooting sounds even more overwhelming with the addition of another piece of information: “In November 1938, my father was hauled off to Buchenwald together with thousands of other male Frankfort Jews. I was not to see him until years later when I, a U.S. soldier, would find him in a newly liberated country.”⁶¹

In a short span of time, this infantryman experienced both the murderous antisemitism of the Nazis in his native land and the anti-Jewish hostility of American servicemen in his new country of residence.⁶² By using physical force, he took a first step toward social acceptance, which he expressed as “distrustful respect.” The oxymoron used in this essay for the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York in 1946 translates both the ingrained prejudice of his opponent and the new social status the Jewish immigrant acquired through fighting. This story also points to the transformation of identities that occurred during military service.

A passage from an essay submitted to the YIVO Institute that same year by Sergeant Isadore Rosen, who fought with the Tenth Armored Infantry Battalion, is revealing as a reflection on how to do away with biased misconceptions toward Jews. Could behaving as both an American patriot and a representative of the Jewish people help fight prejudice? Not without emotion, the young infantryman voiced ways to combat the venom of prejudice while lucidly stating how “tough and depressing” this fight is bound to be.

We should conduct ourselves so that we bring credit upon the countries in which we live. . . . Each Jew in the world should take cognizance of certain inconsistencies which cast aspersions on entire groups, and take steps to rectify those that have been falsely made . . . and if he can demonstrate by his behavior that different religions are not barriers to friendship and understanding, he will be cementing the shaky underpins of a newly erected structure, and he will help cleanse the minds of those who have been infected with these cancerous prejudices against us. The fight to overcome these prejudices will be tough and depressing. But it is worth our entire effort and determination to try.⁶³

Daily efforts of Jewish servicemen to gain acceptance as Americans translated into their brave deeds, awards, and citations—the latter of which were often posthumous. A list of these accomplishments was drawn up as early as 1942 for the War Records Bureau of the National Jewish Welfare Board (JWB) by its director, Dr. Samuel C. Kohs.⁶⁴ In the Chicago Daily News, April 10, 1942, Edwin Lahey published an article titled “Heroic Records of Jews in the Army and Navy to Disprove Vicious Canard,” emphasizing those who saw combat and displayed extreme bravery.

REASSESSING ANTI-JEWISH ATTITUDES AMONG HIGH-RANKING OFFICERS

Some bigoted officers displayed contempt toward Jews and would “rather kill a Jew than a Jap,” according to a written testimony by Ernest Stock, whose identity was first and foremost that of an American. Anti-Jewish hostility in the military hurt him all the more as he felt “an American through and through” and that his religion did not matter: “Being an American, I found it too breath-taking a business to leave time for such old-fashioned, sentimental stuff.”⁶⁵ It was then that an incident affected him and two other Jewish men in his platoon: an officer claimed publicly that he would rather kill a Jew than a Jap “any day.” The three Jewish servicemen resolved to report this slur to the commanding officer. Stock related the settlement of the issue: “It was rumored that the Commanding Officer, a young West Point graduate named Lt. Aycock, who was well liked by everyone, called Cook (the author of the insult) into the orderly room and threatened him with severe disciplinary measures if he continued his actions. From that time on he kept his thoughts to himself.”⁶⁶ This measure did not prevent other bigoted servicemen from verbally assaulting Jews in the unit. Ernest Stock analyzed this expression of Jew hatred thus: “I formed the conviction that their kind are mostly made up of people who are not intelligent enough to be receptive to argument.” This led him to conclude that in such cases, “brute physical force must be met by force, if that is the only language the other one understands.”⁶⁷ However, other examples in the American military, as in civil society, indicate that visceral anti-Jewish hostility derives partly from the environment in which a person lives in his formative years.

General George S. Patton acquired fame as a gifted strategist. He was also known as an antisemite who held a different perception of Jews around him who enjoyed “the refinement of culture,” such as Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau. He despised other Jews, especially Holocaust survivors in displaced persons camps, whom he considered “lower than animals.”⁶⁸ In contrast, President Harry Truman, a Christian, was generally considered sympathetic to the Jewish plight. After the murder of six million Jews was revealed, he was determined to help establish for them a refuge in the Jewish homeland. Having a close relationship with longtime Jewish friend and former business partner Eddie Jacobson, he, too, made a distinction between Jews, as confirmed by a passage of his Memoirs: “I kept my faith in the rightness of my policy in spite of some of the Jews. When I say ‘Jews’ I mean, of course, the extreme Zionists. I know that most Americans of Jewish faith, while they hoped for the restoration of a Jewish homeland, are and always have been Americans first and foremost.”⁶⁹

Harry Truman, like high-ranking officers who graduated from West Point Military Academy, was also a product of his environment in Missouri. When venting annoyance at Jews, he expressed the anti-Jewish prejudice of deep America, of his native town of Independence. In the above-quoted passage from his memoirs, the stereotype of Jews as dishonest people is conveyed through the idea of a possible dual loyalty among “extreme Zionists.”

In bringing nuance to an assessment of anti-Jewish hostility in the American military, it is useful to recall historian David Wyman’s point that “anti-semitism ran through the upper ranks as well,” not only among ignorant young soldiers who had never met a Jew. In his study of anti-Jewish attitudes and politics in the American army, Bendersky demonstrates the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish and racist thoughts from World War I to World War II. He reveals that negative views of Jews among West Point trainees reflected the values and attitudes of White Anglo-Saxon Americans. Jews were not only characterized as cowardly, weak, and selfish, but their “anatomical characteristics” were also noted as being different. Seen as belonging to “a troublesome minority,” any Jew who served in the Roosevelt administration (dubbed “the Jew Deal”), such as Felix Frankfurter, was considered a “dangerous radical.” Even Albert Einstein was labeled an “extreme radical.” In that context, it comes as no surprise that Jewish organizations were seen as nests for subversive activities. Zionism was synonymous with communism for West Point attendees, who were told that the hoax titled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” offered insights about international Jewry.⁷⁰ No wonder army personnel were reluctant to save European Jews during the Holocaust, claiming that the best way to end their persecution was to bring an end to the war.

In his seminal work about antisemitism in America, historian Leonard Dinnerstein observes the following, confirming the existence of contradictory trends: “If some officers and GIs were highly antisemitic in practice, in fairness to the armed services it must be acknowledged that lectures and courses on ethnic and religious tolerance were given. . . . Placing Jews among Christians in the armed forces increased the likelihood of bigotry expressing itself but nothing could be done about that since religious segregation was unconstitutional. Therefore, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox and Secretary of War Henry Stimson issued orders forbidding the circulation of antisemitic publications at all naval and military posts.”⁷¹ Instances of high-ranking officers defending enlisted men are provided through the voices of individuals and the life-story approach of the present volume. Larry Yellin fought a battle for his Jewish identity during World War II when he was sent to the European and Pacific theaters. It began in basic training, which was mostly amphibious training. He spent the time rigorously allotted for breakfast praying inside the army barracks. Some seventy years later, Sergeant Larry Yellin, an Orthodox Jewish veteran born in 1925 who grew up near Chicago, recalled an edifying story that may sound unusual for the military. Once, a general who had watched him pray on entering the barracks asked the second lieutenant in command if Larry was given extra time to get breakfast. The lieutenant replied adamantly: “Absolutely not, it’s not in the book.” “Well,” the general answered promptly, “I want you to give this soldier fifteen minutes every day to pray, and afterward, I want you to see that he gets breakfast.”⁷² Stunned, the lieutenant had to comply.

Larry Yellin, then a private, had promptly enlisted to fight the Nazis and promised his mother that wherever he was stationed, he would be “a representative of the Jewish people.” It is a matter of fact that when a Jewish GI did not behave properly, others in the unit or in society at large tended to condemn all Jews for the improper behavior. This promise led Yellin to make keeping kosher a priority, unlike most Conservative and perhaps also Orthodox soldiers. Eating being a necessity in times of war, Conservative and Orthodox Jews, who were in the majority, were told by Jewish chaplains that they could eat nonkosher food.⁷³ The choice to avoid meat and eat rice without gravy was not easy to sustain every day, and there were times when Yellin did not have anything to eat. However, this discipline gained him a few friends: “The positive side of my dietary requirements was that soldiers noticed that I did not take the main entrees when there was meat. They would always like to get right behind me because when I went through and I said ‘no thank you’ they said ‘I’ll take Yellin’s main entree.’ So I became quite popular.”⁷⁴

Some non-Jewish chaplains—holding officer rank—also displayed a tolerant and even a generous attitude toward Jewish soldiers, sometimes at the risk of their lives. As Yellin’s division, the Eighty-Sixth Infantry, was deployed along the west side of the Rhine River in the area of Cologne, Germany, he realized that the first evening of Passover had come without him having anything to commemorate the holy day. He, together with some fifteen thousand troops, knew that German commandos were intent on probing the strength of American fortifications. He and two other soldiers from Company E were manning a strategic point with a heavy machine gun in an abandoned Bayer factory with orders to shoot at moving targets, which they did. He recalled the memorable and unexpected event on the eve of Passover of the year 1945.

We were surprised to see in the moonlight that the noisy intrusion was one of our jeeps without lights, slowly moving toward our position. It turned out to be a driver with a passenger, a Christian chaplain friend from Wheaton, Illinois. He was a young man recently out of seminary who was interested in learning about Judaism and would join our unit on hikes and training to talk to me about Shabbat and holy days. He greeted me with, “Larry, I know it’s the first night of Passover. I just got hold of a bottle of wine and a box of matza sent over by the Jewish Welfare Board from New York for you and your buddies. They sometimes do things like this a little late.”⁷⁵

Nineteen-year-old Larry greeted the Christian chaplain, who had risked his life to come to a dangerous zone, with his Browning automatic rifle. He first thought that Nazi commandos had landed without being detected, before finding out that the visit was nothing short of a “miracle.” Larry “sent his two Gentile soldiers to find and replace Jerry Shpall and Jay Singer, the only two Jewish soldiers in the area who were manning positions down the line.” They improvised a makeshift igloo with fifty-pound sacks of sugar from the deserted factory and used the flickering light of a candle together with an army-issued flashlight: “To three lone soldiers on the bank of the Rhine, it was an especially meaningful Passover, because it was being held on German soil. Without a Haggada the three of us recited as much as we could recall from memory.”⁷⁶

Out of camaraderie, the non-Jewish soldiers complied with Larry’s request to be momentarily relieved of his watch together with his two Jewish buddies. It was not uncommon for Jewish soldiers to volunteer to stand in for Christian soldiers on Christmas or other holy days. Another noteworthy illustration of the understanding displayed by high-ranking officers is given in Yellin’s oral testimony for the Museum of the Jewish Soldier in Latrun, Israel. While stationed in the Philippines, Yellin was looking for a place to pray on Friday night with at least ten soldiers to form a minyan. Although chapels were supposed to be nondenominational, there was a large Christian icon at the chapel on base that was proper to cover during a Jewish service. The first Shabbat went well. But the following week, the Christian chaplain of the base (who was a colonel) burst in during the middle of the service and, visibly angered, sternly forbade covering the icon facing the men in prayer. Yellin thought the only way to find a place to pray properly would be to appeal to higher echelons. He contacted Major General Harris Melasky, a graduate of the West Point Military Academy who served with the Eighty-Sixth Infantry Division.⁷⁷ Larry Yellin emphasized in his interview that the Major General was “very gracious” to him. The synagogue in Manila had been destroyed by Japanese bombs, so his request was not irrelevant. To Larry’s surprise, Major General Melasky forwarded his request to General Douglas MacArthur himself, who was then stationed in the Philippines. Melasky reported to Yellin that General MacArthur “asked if he would not mind” praying in the general’s mansion, “if it would be suitable for a Shabbath service.” On that Shabbat, it was not fifteen soldiers who turned up to pray but fifty. Yellin had doubts whether all were Jewish or simply curious to get a look at the general’s beautiful home in Manila. Sergeant Yellin also mentioned that General Lucius Clay, who supervised soldiers dealing with displaced persons in the American occupied zone of Germany, displayed understanding of the Jewish plight. He was sympathetic toward the Jewish survivors going illegally to Palestine at the risk of being thrown again into a detention camp. Indeed, British soldiers controlled the ports and arrested ships, crews, and passengers, sometimes very brutally, to the point that some young Holocaust survivors died of the wounds.⁷⁸

It is significant that Yellin began his oral testimony by recalling how antipathy against Jews, combined with negative feelings against Jewish refugees, penetrated all sectors of American society in the troubled 1930s. He explained, with contained emotion, how his mother reacted to his desire to have a sister and a brother by offering to adopt two child refugees from Germany. But the anti-Jewish hatred of the late 1930s, combined with xenophobia and a fear that immigrants would take American jobs, hampered the admission of Jewish refugee children from Germany. The Wagner-Rogers Bill died in Congress in mid-1939, suppressing the hope of “legislation to permit a set number of children under age eighteen to enter the U.S. outside the quota system,” as Richard Breitman and Alan Kraut wrote in their seminal study on American refugee policy and European Jewry. “Twenty thousand charming children would all too soon grow into twenty thousand ugly adults,” argued the wife of Commissioner of Immigration James Houghteling, “whose main qualification for the job was that his wife was FDR’s cousin.”⁷⁹ Many instances depicted the atmosphere of Jewish hatred, the seeds of which had been “sown and nurtured for years.”⁸⁰ Jewish soldiers then reaped the fruits; the taste was all the more bitter as Jewish Americans sacrificed their lives in the hope that Jew hatred and discrimination would vanish at home and abroad.

An incident reported by one of the pilots interviewed by Bruce Wolk reveals how the wounds were kept open after the end of World War II. Paul Kaufman, an officer, flew a B-17 with the 388th Bombardment group of the 560th Bomb Squadron. When his plane, Millie-K, was shot down over Merseburg, Germany, he was captured after bailing out and imprisoned in a prisoner of war (POW) camp. At war’s end, his family arranged to meet him on Pier Sixty, New York, a long-expected and emotional reunion for the soldiers returning from Europe. But the ship on which he came back to the United States was delayed, and his father was not allowed to take another day off work. This is how he depicted his homecoming: “We finally arrived at Pier 60. Nobody was there to meet us. There was a man handing over flyers to select people. One of my buddies got a flyer and I asked to see it. It said something like: ‘So and so died in Europe, Colin Kelly died in Guadalcanal, etc. . . . and Nathan Goldstein, the son-of-a-bitch got four brand new tires.’ I said to myself, will it ever end?”⁸¹

All over the United States, similar lines, with variations, were sung as parodies on military hymns. There are oral and written versions of the hymn “The First American.” Yet no version mentions the name of the bombardier who died in the Pacific next to celebrated American hero Colin Kelly, “the First American to sink a Jap ship,” as the line goes.⁸² Was it because his name was Meyer Levin and “he was just a Brooklyn boy who grew up in a shabby neighborhood with nothing but free air and hope to let him know he was an American”? The 1942 article in the Jacksonville Journal that drew attention to Levin contains these powerful lines: “Let his deed be just another reminder that his much-slandered religious group, though making up only three per cent of our population, has received eight per cent of the Distinguished Service Crosses awarded by the American government.”⁸³ Sergeant Meyer Levin’s bravery and achievements were purposely hidden by antisemites. A twenty-five-year-old Air Corps bombardier from Brooklyn, he enlisted in the Air Corps on June 6, 1939, and served in the United States before being transferred to Hawaii. A few days after the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, he flew on a mission against the Japanese navy. With pilot Captain Colin P. Kelly, bombardier Levin launched a shower of bombs in two separate attacks that destroyed and sank the Japanese battleship Haruna in the Pacific. Meyer Levin bravely continued to do his duty in the Battle of the Coral Sea, where he sank an enemy vessel, a feat for which he was awarded a Silver Star and a promotion from corporal to sergeant. He was also one of seventy-five men who made the risky flight to Manila in September 1941 with an air flotilla commanded by fellow Brooklynite Major Emmet O’Donnel. A hero of the Pacific aerial war, Levin received three decorations for gallantry in action—the Distinguished Flying Cross, the Silver Star, and the Oak Leaf Cluster—before he was killed in action off New Guinea when his bomber was shot down.⁸⁴ He was the first Jewish hero, and when he died at age twenty-six, he had taken part in about sixty combat flights.

The lengthy list of heroic records established by the JWB includes similar feats on various fronts in all the branches of the military; above all, it evinces the readiness of Jewish American servicemen to die for their country.⁸⁵ It is also a tribute to the servicemen’s devotion and patriotic loyalty. The story of Jewish participation “that has only begun to unfold” is eloquently expressed in the Congressional Record, Seventy-Seventh Congress, second session, July 2, 1942: “That story was written in the foxholes of Bataan, in the bomb bays of high flying fighter planes, on the decks of ships where the guns flash.” What is more, the statements pronounced in Congress and made eternal by the written word establish a linkage between the selfless dedication of Jewish GIs to their country and their own religious history, from bondage to freedom: “And now, in this new struggle for liberty we find Jews rendering service of the highest quality, and like Private Schleifer, often being among the first to give their lives for their country whose abiding democratic principles stem from the tenets of their own religious history.”⁸⁶ Undoubtedly, Jewish veterans were later counted among the warriors for freedom in what has been called the Greatest Generation.⁸⁷ Demonstrating Jewish patriotism and contributions to the American military sprung from emotional impulses, as expressed by GIs in their writings during or immediately after the war.⁸⁸

***

Jewish heroism was defined and perceived in various ways. What did it mean for American soldiers as Jews? On the one hand, most American Jewish soldiers could not easily refer to Jewish heroes in World War I, although there were some. On the other hand, they identified with the heroic Maccabees in the context of the Hanukkah festival. Memoirs sent to the YIVO Institute in 1946 show that many GIs went to Hebrew school or Sunday school. They learned about the Jewish warrior Judah Maccabee, third son of Mattathias, the Hasmonean who led the revolt against the yoke of Antiochus Epiphanes in the land of Israel (Eretz Israel) and vanquished the oppressor—as told in the Books of Maccabees. As Jews, identification with a Jewish hero boosted morale and helped GIs fight the negative stereotype of the weak Jew. The heroic service that Jews performed during the war shielded them from anti-Jewish slurs. The service is seen through the brave deeds of military officers David Daniel Marcus, Paul Shulman, and Sergeant Meyer Levin, the holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross, Silver Star Award for Heroism at Coral Sea, and Oak Leaf for gallantry. A reflection on heroism as a response to anti-Jewish attitudes in the military is therefore an underlying thread in the narrative of this work.

Responses to victimization included extreme bravery and selflessness. Jewish servicemen embraced American ideals of masculinity and heroism in the same ways as their fellow soldiers, equating the military value of fighting with manly characteristics. In reference to their need for acceptance, their efforts to belong in the military and their deeds may be retroactively interpreted as strategies to combat persecution and anti-Jewish attitudes; on the whole, however, these were spontaneous responses. To put it differently, a reinforced Jewish identity on the one hand and a behavior resorting to heroism on the other were an antidote to anti-Jewish hostility and a stamp of loyalty and devotion to the country’s values. This sentiment was confirmed by many American servicemen who fought both during World War II and for the fledgling State of Israel. Brooklyn-born Dan Nadel, a proud patriot who enlisted in the American army after the Pearl Harbor attack, became a combat engineer and experienced twenty-five river crossings under fire in the European theater. He recounted: “I felt that we had served America well, saving the Jewish people in the process. . . . To have survived seven decades ago was against all odds; I believe it was only possible by the grace of God.”⁸⁹ From 1942 to 1945, wearing a Jewish amulet attached to his dog tags, he fought many battles, including the Battle of the Bulge in France, and landed shortly after D-Day at Omaha Beach in Normandy, sustained by his Jewish faith and motivation to fight what “Hitler was doing to the Jews.”⁹⁰ Discovering concentration camps under the command of General Patton, he comforted the survivors of Nazi concentration camps. Dan Nadel earned five battle stars in the Battle of the Bulge and the liberation of France.⁹¹

Ironically, many Jewish GIs excelled in a job they did not like but had to do for their country. As comedy icon Mel Brooks, born in Brooklyn as Melvin Kaminsky to Jewish immigrant parents, put it: “I was a combat engineer. Isn’t that ridiculous? The two things I hate most in the world are combat and engineering.” Reflecting on what triggered his comedy style, the former combat engineer charged with defusing land mines recalled the frustrations of a Jewish kid who enlisted at age seventeen: “I’m sure a lot of my comedy is based on anger and hostility. Growing up in Williamsburg, I learned to clothe it into comedy to spare myself problems—like a punch in the face.”⁹²

To counter persistent slander targeting Jewish GIs, the JWB and other Jewish organizations drew up lists of Jewish servicemen and servicewomen. They believed doing so would help dispel the myth that Jews were draft dodgers or mostly in the Quartermaster Corps, where they were good suppliers.⁹³ As a result, they were indirectly led to think in terms of contribution to the war effort rather than participation. The numerous examples of extreme bravery or heroism indicate that excellence was required to make a mark. Excelling, “being the best,” was not only congruent with the American ethos—it was a necessity for acceptance into American society well into the 1950s, mid-1960s, and still later to climb the social ladder. In that light, Jewish soldiers’ self-imposed discipline met the ideal of the self-made man as exemplified in American society by Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, or Andrew Carnegie. Yet the picture is complex because there were contradictory forces at work in those years. In the military, finding refuge among other Jews was an option or response akin to “sticking to one’s own kind,” a tendency characteristic of minority groups in the United States. This response happened during religious services and celebration of Jewish holy days, which was legitimate, although more difficult for those who saw combat. The encouragement to mesh with comrades also existed in the American military. Some servicemen volunteered to help non-Jewish chaplains to conduct Jewish services, a practice that proved broadmindedness on all parts. At the same, as historian Jonathan Sarna puts it, “cooperation was in the interest of the military” and supported by the Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities (CANRA) of the JWB.⁹⁴ This new attitude of encouraging observance of the Jewish faith—just like the two other main religions—enables a reassessment of antisemitism or, more properly termed, Jew hatred. Even more significant is the fact that some officers in the higher ranks did not share pervasive negative attitudes toward Jews, according to various testimonies noted above. Furthermore, the fact that a few high reserve officers, like Colonel David (Mickey) Marcus, whose immigrant father was a pushcart peddler, were admitted to West Point testifies to a spirit of tolerance displayed when in harmony with American interests. Proof for this statement is that Colonel Marcus is proclaimed “A Soldier for All Humanity” in the West Point Military Cemetery. In terms of respect for American values and in congruence with the American president’s support of the establishment of the Jewish state, the awareness of the Jewish plight’s universalistic overtones had the potential to counter prejudice. However, negative stereotypes of Jews as service dodgers, for example, remained entrenched in everyday language and were shared in society. World War II functioned in the various theaters as a laboratory of experiments—physical, mental, and social—for Jewish soldiers and their non-Jewish comrades.

The next chapter will expand on the expression of prejudice that servicemen encountered in French North Africa, among other unique and novel war experiences.