JEWS ADVISED NOT TO FIGHT

Hi all,

I wrote a story on Twitter the other day about a fight over what Jews should do about a bunch of powerful racists. The fight took place in 1922, but it has some resonance today, and so the tweets got a lot of attention. I have included the tweets below, followed by a few brief addendum on a bit of the story that didn't make the original essay.

Jews Fight About Fighting the Klan

1. On Thanksgiving in 1922, congregants at one of New York City's leading synagogues heard a sermon on not attacking the Ku Klux Klan.

2. "It would be a mistake for Jews to wage war against the [KKK]," the sermonizer told B'nai Jeshurun, then a bastion of the German elite.

3. Meanwhile, nearly every other pulpit in New York City was busy calling hellfire down on the Klan.

4. A minister at a big Protestant church in Midtown was exposed as a Klan boss the week before, and the city was in an anti-Klan fervor.

5. "Drive them out of our city as rapidly as you discover them," the mayor, John Hylan, told the police commissioner.

6. Amid the frenzy, a Jewish group called the Independent Order of B'rith Abraham declared "open warfare" on the Klan.
 

7. B'rith Abraham seems to have been a working class mutual aid society. Members got sick benefits, death benefits, funeral benefits.8. Its leader, a New York City judge, wanted to get together all the Jewish fraternities for an organized push against the Klan.

9. “It is indeed a very sad situation when we are obliged to endure this kind of narrow and barbaric discrimination,” he said.

10. A day after the Times reported on B'rith Abraham's effort, the judge got a letter from the dean of the German Jewish aristocracy.

11. Louis Marshall, founder of the American Jewish Committee, didn't want the Jewish rabble making noise against the Klan.

12. "You are making a grave mistake," Marshall wrote. "Let me urge you with all the earnestness in my power to give up this idea."

13. Marshall thought that a wealthy elite should lead the Jews. He thought Jewish groups should make gestures towards political neutrality.

14. Mostly, he didn’t want non-elite Jews organizing themselves politically. And he certainly didn’t want them declaring “war” on the Klan.

15. Jewish political action could bring anti-Jewish reaction, so Marshall liked the inside game. Be quiet in public; exert private pressure.

16. The communal rank-and-file at B’rith Abraham felt differently. Maybe they had less to lose. Maybe they couldn't play the inside game.

17. But Marshall smacked them down. He said the anti-Klan fight should be left to Protestants: ”This is not a Jewish or a Catholic issue.”

18. It's the same theme that the sermonizer at B'nai Jeshurun, a Protestant lawyer named James Gerard, took up on Thanksgiving.

19. "Leave [the Klan] to us," Gerard told the wealthy German Jewish congregants, attacking B'rith Abraham's plans.
 

20. It's unclear what happened to B'rith Abraham's anti-Klan push. What is clear is that Marshall continued to oppose attacks on the Klan.

21. He sent a letter to Stephen Wise, leader of the populist American Jewish Congress, condemning him for holding an anti-Klan protest.

22. And he told a Jewish college frat not to worry about the Klan. “It is not our fight,” he said.
 

23. In 1924, Congress passed a racist immigration law favored by the Klan. Marshall took up the inside game to stop it.

24. He asked for a meeting with the president, Calvin Coolidge. He couldn’t get one. Instead, he sent Coolidge a brief attacking the law.

25. Coolidge signed the law anyhow.

26. All of which is to say: This Jewish dispute over whether and how to condemn the alt-right and its allies? A very old one.

27. Answers were baked into the various arms of the Jewish establishment a century ago by men like Marshall and Wise.

28. These are core strategic questions of the Jewish establishment: Who do Jewish groups attack? Who do they defend? At what risk?

29. Do you protest on the street? Or wait for the private meeting? And if the private meeting doesn’t go your way, what then?

30. Can’t imagine Jewish fraternities could have done much good against the Klan in 1922. But Marshall, too, ultimately failed.
 

Addendum

Coolidge signed the racist, Klan-backed immigration law in May of 1924. The next month, the Republican Party nominated him to run for reelection.

The Klan was a major issue in 1924 campaign, for both the Republicans and for Democrats. The Democrats narrowly failed to approve a proposed anti-Klan plank for their party platform, but the nominee eventually selected at their protracted, contentious convention was a Klan opponent named John W. Davis. Davis had loudly denounced the Klan, and so Coolidge was asked to do the same. He refused.

Louis Marshall supported him anyhow.

Marshall's tolerance for coziness with the Klan was unusually high. Other Jewish leaders criticized Coolidge for not condemning the Klan. When a group of New Jersey Jews issued a letter in October calling Coolidge's silence "an endorsement of the Klan and its stand against the Jew," Marshall attacked them outright.

The country was in a racist mood in 1924, and Coolidge won in a landslide. The president appears to have been grateful to Marshall. On the Jewish leader's 70th birthday in 1926, Coolidge sent a note that made its way into the New York Times. "May it be a very happy day and may your strength be preserved to carry on your good work," he wrote. "My best wishes for health and happiness."

Below, a 1925 photo of Coolidge addressing a Jewish event. Marshall is visible in the front row, on the far left side.