Top: Jewish Occupied Governments: United States

Jews in the Bush Administration

Archived on July 19, 2004 from http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/US-Israel/bushjews.html where it appeared under the title of "Jewish Virtual Library" in accordance with the "fair use" provision of copyright law for use as research, educational, and scholarly investigation and study which is the focus of the scholarly website Jew Watch.

Sources: News reports, Republican Jewish Coalition

Harvard professor Seymour Martin Lipset, a sociologist, has spent much time analyzing Jewish participation in the New Left. He emphases that many of the new radicals are repelled by the hypocrisy of their parents, who espouse liberal causes, then turn around and exploit those less well off in their business or on vacation; they imbue their chil-dren with the message of mankind's equality, then com-plain about uppityness when the maid asks a five dollar raise to sixty-five dollars a week. "Many Jewish parents," Lipset has written, "unlike gentile parents of equivalent high economic class background, live a schizophrenic ex-istence. They sustain a high degree of tension between their ideology and their life style." What kind of models are these, who started out wanting to change the world and then, when they accumulated a few dollars, suddenly lost their reformist zeal? Further, anything that threatened their new life style was to be resisted.

Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, president of the American Jewish Congress, preferred an economic explanation of Jewish prominence in the New Left. "These kids are not merely the children of left-wing parents," he said. "These kids are now the new rentiers. They don't need economic careers, therefore they can really stay out of society and ~ around at Berkeley. The key to Mark Rudd [leader ~th. S.D.S. disruption of Columbia University in the lat. i 96os] is not left-wing politics but an unlimited expense account. Indeed, young Jewish radicals do gener-ally come from well off families. As Feingold noted, "We can see youngsters who seem poverty stricken but carry around their necks the most expensive cameras or who spend small fortunes on other 'arty' hobbies such as film making."

"What the media have missed," said Morris B. Abram, speaking in the scenic office once occupied by Arthur J. Goldberg at Paul Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, "is that these are the children of affluent families. The movement is drawing from a heavily Jewish base. Ninety per cent of Jewish children of college age are attending college but only 45 per cent of the population as a whole who are of college age attend college. And the colleges they're attending are not just any colleges-they're the good schools in the Fast. The revolt, you know, occurred in the best institutions, not the average ones. You'll never have a revolt at a military school, or a religious school. You would never have one at a place like Oral Roberts College. The revolts are at places like Columbia, Har-vard, Brandeis." Abram was president of Brandeis during its most turbulent days and he sees economics, of both the student protesters and of the faculty members of the col-leges, as a key factor:

"Much of the student protest movement was the direct result of faculty participation. You had a case of grown people trying to get student adulation and, without that, I don't think the protest movement would have amounted to a hill of beans. Remember, in 1968 and '69, the uni-versities were struggling to retain good faculty people. The Ph.D. market wasn't flooded then, as it is now. The pr~ fessors felt secure, and they acted irresponsibly. It's inter-esting to note that, when the Ph.D. market dried up, the protest movement dried up. In the good schools in the Fast, up to 30 per cent of the faculty members are Jewish and, very frequently, these are the younger faculty. The older [predominantly gentile] faculty members were hired when there was discrimination in academia. By 1968, a large proportion of the younger faculty was Jewish and this younger faculty felt an affinity for the students who were Jews-the Jews, after all, had the higher board scores, and the brightest students are always the most yeasty." Along with this, Abram said, the Jewish students were ripe for the anticapitalist tone of the movement because "their parents talked very liberal at home, as Jews always have. The parents' liberalism, of course, was largely as a reaction against fascism, which colored the thinking of almost any Jew who could read and write. The parents talked liberal and then, in the 1960s, the thrust of the civil rights movement was no longer for civil and political rights. In the middle of the Johnson years, the civil rights movement began to switch into an economic and social movement. Suddenly, the civil rights movement had a price tag. I suspect that Jews, like everybody else, started to look at the civil rights movement differently. They began to get up tight and their children tended to look askance at their parents' sense of values." The children Abram was describing were not particularly the children of onetime Communists or onetime Socialists. They are the down-ward-striving offspring of the most upward-striving parents. "They are repelled," as Feingold wrote, "by the strident cult of success hammered on incessantly by their ambitious parents. For some, it is clear that Judaism means simply 'making it,' becoming a doctor or a lawyer." Further, he says, the kids "have not read Marx; all they really know is that, for them, the 'system' doesn't work."

In his youth in Baltimore, Waskow said, " . . . shabbas [the Sabbath day] was Mr. Shapiro up the street yelling at me because I was carrying books to the library. I've never dug that and I still don't, the notion that shabbas was prohibitions, that it was unfree. . . . Beginning about two years ago, I began to get a sense of shabbas as a liberation, not as unfreedom, not as restrictions. All right, you're not supposed to work. But the whole point in what we're reaching for is a society in which people don't have to work, in which work and play get intermixed. My dream for a society of the messianic age is a place where you get what you need when you need it because you need it. . . . I discovered a few years ago that there's a strand in tradition, a very long strand, which says shabbas is a moment in the messianic age, it's the nearest we can get. Fvery week, we try to create a little piece, just to remind ourselves what it's like. And there's even a strand in the tradition that says the messianic age will come when the whole Jewish people celebrates two shabases in a row. The way to get there is to do it. I guess the theory in my head and my gut sense of what the world should be like is that there should be a community, a neighborhood. . . .I put the best things about the neigh-borhood together with my best dreams and I began to see how they relate and I also see the ways in which the neigh-borhood is messed up and begin to see what it would mean to create a really good neighborhood, a really good com-Waskow and his fellow radicals represent an enormous
threat to most older Jews, especially the intellectual elite that has set the agenda for discussion of Jewish issues over the past several decades. When this writer evinced ad-miration for Waskow's gentle nature and humanism, one Jewish intellectual blurted out:

"The amazing thing about Waskow is that he doesn't know anything; he's an am ho'orets [Hebrew for ignoramus].- everything-at least materially-that one cannot find a gift for them. Their parents were part of a culture that was in-tent on "making it" and "making it" often meant spending increasingly less time at home. Fven though the Jewish family has retained some of the closeness traditionally ascribed to it, more and more sons and daughters have grown up seeing only a glimpse of their parents' attentions and emotions. Consumer goods are no substitute for love.

At the same time, they have been protected from the world, as good Jewish parents are inclined to do with their children. Despite the interest and activity of so many of the parents in politics, the children have often remained ignorant of the realities of power. The situation is wholly different with the Jews of Israel, as Feingold has written, since they are "accustomed to exercising power and as-suming responsibility for their own interest and security. They cannot afford to hold. . . universalistic assumptions because the experience of governing has taught them that in the real world, civilization, whether it calls itself open society' or 'socialist humanism,' is not nearly so generous or so rational as ideologists assume.' These new Jewish radicals of America are ignorant about power.

This highborn Episcopalian was a superb New York politician, which among other things meant that Roosevelt had come to know many Jews well. Jewish labor leaders, in particular, adored Governor Roosevelt. David Dubinsky of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union recalled how Roosevelt would yank industry executives into his office in Albany and knock heads to force agreements out of them. As governor, Roosevelt often called on one old friend in particular for help with tricky legal parts of the pioneer-ing social legislation he was planning for the state. The old friend was Harvard law professor Felix Frankfurter.

After March 1933 the bright young lawyers, many of them Jews, who Frankfurter had been sending to Albany were diverted instead to Washington. The new immigrants were called "Frankfurter's happy hot dogs." Among the first was Benjamin V. Cohen, who was called in for assistance in drafting emergency legislation to deal with the Wall Street crisis. Cohen, James McCauley Landis, and Thomas G. Corcoran-with regular telephone calls to Frankfurter in Cambridge-wrote the Securities Act of 1933 based on the idea that corporations were in fact pub-lic and therefore ought to be publicly regulated. The idea may have seemed somewhat radical in America, hut it was not so radical according to precepts of Jewish communality and to the Talmudic recognition that "property is funda-mentally a social object. . . subject to social control." The team of Corcoran and Cohen that traipsed in and out of the White House became famous; tagged the "gold dust twins," they lived in a much-publicized "little red house" on R Street in Georgetown. Corcoran was the suave and articulate front man, Cohen the withdrawn, bespectacled genius who would ponder late into the night considering how to fit what it was they were doing into the framework of the Constitution. They took on one project after an-other; after drafting the Securities and Exchange Act of '934, they worked on the Public Utility Holding Act of 1935, the Federal Communications Act, the bill establishing the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Wagner Act, the Minimum Wage Act. While Frankfurter set the tone and while the glib Corcoran did the talking at the White House and on Capitol Hill, Cohen did the work. While Colien would never admit that he wrote much of the most important New Deal legislation, in fact, said Joe Rauh, "Ben was the intellectual leader of this thing. Even Felix would call him for advice." Cohen, a remarkably self-effacing man, insisted otherwise, saying, "Corcoran was no slouch, you know."
More prestigious advice came from another Jew, Louis Dembitz Brandeis, who had been sitting on the Supreme Court since 1916. He transmitted counsel on how to make this or that constitutional, pressing his long-held philos-ophy that, the larger corporations became, the more dan-gerous their bigness was to the public weal.

Cohen, Frankfurter, and Brandeis were but the top echelon. Other Jews joined the New Deal apparatus. Abe Fortas was assigned to the new SEC; Mordecai Ezekiel was sent in as the Agriculture Department's economist; Henry Morgenthau, Jr., ("Henry the Morgue," to the ebullient F.D.R.) became Secretary of the Treasury; Charles Wyzanski went to the Labor Department; Isador Lubin took over the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in effect becoming F.D.R.'s economist; David Niles became the first of what is by now a line of special White House "point men" for handling minorities' affairs; the young Joe Rauh became part of it, after serving as a law clerk first to Justice Cardozo, then to Frankfurter after his appointment to the court; and there were Bernard Baruch, David Lilienthal, and Sam Rosenman (the man who coined the words for it all, "New Deal"), to name a few others. top of page

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Israel's Hold Over the US Government -- How it Neutralizes US Candidates & The Totally Unfair Uniqueness of Press & Political Israeli Relationship

Jewish Numbers Grow at the State Department

Salon Magazine ZINE Feb 13th Jonathan Broder top of page

Once a WASP preserve, the State Department may soon be dominated by WJMs (white Jewish males).

BY JONATHAN BRODER, Feb. 13, 1997

WASHINGTON -- following the recent revelations about Madeleine Albright's Jewish roots, the new U.S. Secretary of State faces a new conundrum: All her top candidates for a slew of senior positions in the State Department are Jewish -- and male.

A number of foreign policy experts have been quick to note the exquisiteness of the irony. "It suggests that we've come a long way in this country from the days when the foreign service was reserved for a very WASPy elite," says former National Security Council Middle East advisor Richard Haass, who now directs foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution.

But it also poses problems for Albright. If all the Jewish candidates are appointed, Albright could draw fire from other minorities and women, not to mention pro-Arab critics of Washington's Mideast policy and anti-Semites of various stripes.

"I'm sure this will feed all the black helicopter kooks who think all this is a Jewish conspiracy," said one Jewish foreign policy analyst who asked not to be identified.

Albright already has promoted two Jewish appointees to senior positions: Special Middle East coordinator Dennis Ross is now Albright's senior counselor, a position that extends his trouble-shooting responsibilities well beyond the Middle East and gives him an office on the State Department's prestigious seventh floor. Meanwhile, the position of undersecretary of State for economic affairs has gone to Stuart Eizenstadt, previously ambassador to the European Community and the administration's point man on determining the extent of Jewish assets in Swiss banks.

And for the first time in the State Department's 208-year history, Jews lead the list of contenders for the six regional assistant secretary posts. According to well- informed sources, they are:

Mark Grossman, currently U.S. ambassador to Turkey, for assistant secretary for European affairs; Princeton Lyman, currently the assistant secretary of State for international organizations, and former Rep. Howard Wolpe of Michigan, for assistant secretary for African affairs; Stanley Roth, an aide to former Rep. Steven Solarz of New York and a former staffer on the National Security Council, for assistant secretary for Asian affairs; Karl Indefurth, a former ABC News correspondent who served as Albright's deputy at the United Nations, for assistant secretary for South Asia; Jeff Davidow, assistant secretary of State for Latin American affairs, who is expected to stay on at his post; Martin Indyk, currently U.S. ambassador to Israel, for assistant secretary for Near Eastern Affairs.

Having chosen (non-Jewish) diplomatic veterans Strobe Talbott and Thomas Pickering as her No. 2 and No. 3, respectively, Albright may come under fire in diversity-conscious Washington for such a heavily Jewish and all-male lineup. Her biggest challenge, however, is likely to come with Indyk, who worked for AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and then headed the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy before joining the administration.

"The Near East bureau always has prided itself in having career professionals at the helm," says Robert Kaplan, whose book, "The Arabists," examines the State Department's stewardship of Middle East policy. Indyk, appointed by President Clinton as his Middle East advisor in 1993 and then as ambassador to Israel, "is a political candidate," says Kaplan.

"In some circles," he adds, "there's a lot of resentment that people like Ross, (his Jewish deputy Aaron) Miller, and Indyk got so powerful in Near East affairs." Such resentment may ultimately scotch Indyk's chances at the post, which could go instead to Ned Walker, a former deputy to Albright at the United Nations and now U.S. ambassador to Egypt, or Chris Ross, U.S. ambassador to Syria. Both of them are Arabists.

If Middle Eastern politics end up getting in Indyk's way, gender politics could decide who gets the position as undersecretary of State for management. Two male candidates are vying for the job, but Albright is said to want to fill the slot with a woman. Her top candidate: an assistant Interior secretary for policy and management named Bonnie Cohen.

Albright's newly uncovered Jewish past and the prospect of so many Jews entering the State Department has already occasioned some mordant humor in foreign policy circles. For example:

Q: Why did Pamela Harriman have a stroke?

A: Someone leaned over at a party and told her Madeleine Albright was Jewish.

Responding to concerns that there may be too many Jews at the State Department, one foreign policy analyst said: "What's there to worry about? After all, they're all Reform anyway."

Jonathan Broder is Salon's Washington correspondent. He also writes for the Jerusalem Report and is a senior editor for the weekend edition of "All Things Considered." top of page

Persistent promotion of bad ideas, from the founding of Israel to liberal social causes, is the problem I see with Jews who are political activists.

For example, regarding Israel and immigration, the Jewish population of Palestine was small about 100 years ago, when the modern Zionist movement began, and it wasn't a problem to the Arab majority. However, the Zionists wanted to claim the territory for Jews, and they wanted to have immigration of Jews to Palestine from all over the world. To accomplish that, they needed the cooperation of the Western Powers, and England in particular. To influence England, prominent Jews in the western countries lobbied their governments to support a policy of making a new country for Jews in Palestine. This was at a time when colonialism by Western Powers was dying out, but an exception was being made for the Jews. This was decades before the Jews' difficulties in Nazi Germany. One such prominent Jew was Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who was neutral on the question of Zionism when President Woodrow Wilson appointed him, but who became a strong Zionist influence on Wilson during the period when the US was deciding whether/when to enter WW1. A German defeat in the war would enable England to retain its jurisdiction in Palestine, and England would then allow the Zionists to colonize Palestine. As we know, WW1 started in 1914, was in stalemate by the time the US entered the war in 1917, and the war ended in 1918 with victory for England and defeat for Germany. The US entry into the war was controversial -- it took three years for interests who favored US entry, such as the Zionists, to persuade the US to enter it. Other notable interests in favor of our entry into the war were bankers and merchants, who stood to lose fortunes if England and France defaulted on loans for war supplies. A German defeat was needed to protect these "Merchants of Death", as they were later called when the war and the US entry into it were analyzed. A German defeat was also needed to guarantee the Zionists' interests in Palestine.

When the Germans were defeated, the Jews in Germany were seen as traitors because of their unique connection with international interests that had worked for Germany's defeat. This exascerbated anti-Semitism which had existed in Germany for centuries. So, the German Jews were in trouble. They needed counties to emigrate to, and two such countries were the the US and Palestine. Trouble was, the US was passing laws for immigration restrictions about that time, and Palestine lacked the infrastructure for accepting large numbers of immigrants. The answer, in the opinion of the Jews, was for the US to take in all the Jewish immigrants that wanted to come. They lobbied the US government during the interwar years and during WW2, but the US retained immigration restrictions and Jews blamed the US for some of the Jewish losses during the war. Thay blamed the US, in spite of the fact that even more Jews would have been casualties if the US had not fought the war.

After the war, the Jews were determined to open up the US borders, so that "never again" would the US fail to take in anyone. In 1965 the "odious", "racist" immigration restrictions were lifted during the LBJ administration, when every special interest with a sob story got their "rights" written into law. ( And now, 5 trillion dollars later, ... ) The issue of loyalty is central to your question. Political groups in America should work for American interests. Many of the Jewish groups of a political nature in America have ties to Israel. One of their activities is to work for immigration of Jews from other countries to the US and Israel, but in order to keep the US borders open to Jews, the borders also have to be open for everyone else, since we can't have discrimination. So, the borders are open to the third world, and the third world is invading. And, not to forget Palestine, now that millions of Jews have immigrated there, displacing Arabs, we find that we have made enemies for ourselves there, since the Arabs perceive something akin to an umbilical cord between the US and Israel. top of page

"Roosevelt opened the offices of government as never before to Jews. Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Samuel Rosenman, Felix Frankfurter, Benjamin Cohen, David Niles, Anna Rosenberg, Sidney Hillman, and David Dubinsky were among his closest advisors in politics and government. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the pre-eminent spokesman for American Zionism, and his daughter Justine Polier, were personal friends of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt with as much access to the White House as anyone." -- From "America, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust" By William J. vanden Heuvel: Keynote address of the fifth annual Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Lecture, held Oct. 17, 1996 at Roosevelt University in Chicago.

Click for the Internet Resource for this Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Lecture as of December 16, 1998.

Haaretz: America Pro-Jewish No Matter Which Party Candidate

Archived under "fair use" provision of the copyright law at the scholarly website www.jewwatch.com only for scholarly, research, and educational use from its article on the web on August 3, 2004 at www.haaretz.com at its URL: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/458487.html.

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Last update - 09:44 01/08/2004
Another president who won't budge the Middle East
By Nathan Guttman

BOSTON - Even though there are still three months before the presidential elections in the United States, one fact is already clear - no matter who wins, the stance of the White House regarding the conflict in the Middle East will continue to be unequivocably pro-Israeli. George Bush supports the disengagement plan, as does John Kerry. Bush agrees to the inclusion of the settlement blocs in a permanent agreement, as does Kerry. Bush thinks there is no room for the Palestinian refugees in Israel, and Kerry agrees. The next American administration, Republican or Democrat, will continue to support, without hesitation, the policies of the government of Israel. On the matter of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Bush and Kerry are identical twins.

The path of the Democratic candidate John Kerry toward the formulation of his stance on Israel says a great deal about the political pressures in the United States. During his 20 years in the Senate, Kerry has always been considered pro-Israel, and no one can point to a single instance where he diverged from this stance. Still, in the early stages of the race, the Jewish-American community saw him as a somewhat problematic candidate. This stemmed from a number of comments pointed out by rivals within his own party.

During the primaries, Kerry said in a speech to a group of Arab-Americans, that the separation fence being constructed by Israel is problematic. In an earlier interview, Kerry suggested that former president Jimmy Carter or former Bush Sr. secretary of state James Baker may serve as mediators in the Middle East if he is elected president. He also expressed support for the Geneva Accord after it was signed. His opponents recall that during the 1990s Kerry described Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat as a "diplomat" and commended him for the change he had undergone once he became a negotiator in peace talks.

While these opinions diverted from the official stance of the government of Israel, they are all within the mainstream political discourse. After all, even Colin Powell lauded the Geneva Accord, the Bush administration (and the High Court of Justice in Israel) have criticized the route of the separation fence, and as for Baker and Carter, despite their critical stance of the government of Israel, they are remembered as great mediators of the Camp David agreements and of the Madrid Conference.

But in the current American political reality there is no room for nuances. The minute Kerry was marked as problematic from Israel's point of view, his aides became concerned that they might lose Jewish votes - and no less important, Jewish contributions - to the Bush camp. Kerry understood the message and made a turnaround, changing his mind about Baker and Carter, noting that Arafat cannot be a partner in any future negotiations, declaring the separation fence as "legitimate," and stopping references to the Geneva Accord. More importantly, Kerry has made it clear in his political manifesto and in talks with representatives of the Jewish community, that in no way will he pressure Israel or raise new initiatives without first consulting its government.

Thus, the good news is that the next man to sit in the White House will do nothing contrary to the view of the government of Israel. The not-so-good news is that no matter who is elected, the Middle East is guaranteed a further four years of standstill.

It is true, however, that it is difficult to trust the declarations of presidential candidates. George Bush, if elected, will be in his second term and will therefore feel free to take action and may even be surprising. It is also worth remembering that despite Kerry's declarations, Democratic presidents have the tendency to involve themselves well above their heads in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But if one chooses to believe politicians, the 2004 presidential elections in the United States are not heralding a breakthrough in the Middle East.

In Kerry's camp they claim the novelty he offers is in the approach. Contrary to Bush, Kerry wants to be more involved, he wants to cooperate in an international formula, and he promises to be different from Bush in demanding that Saudi Arabia will be more answerable for its actions. The emphasis is on differences of style, not substance.

The enormous support Israel enjoys in the United States guarantees that in future election campaigns the candidates will take a clearly pro-Israeli stance and support, without flinching, the government of Israel. This may not augur a solution to the conflict, but it is conducive for the return to normalcy in Jewish-American politics. The matter of Israel was removed from the agenda when both candidates convinced the Jews that support is unequivocal. Now the Jewish community can go back to focusing on matters that once used to be determining issues in elections - welfare, health, separation of religion and state, and safeguarding of human rights.