When Christianity ruled Europe, it made sense for European Jews to side with anti-clerical factions.
You don’t find many Jews in any diaspora movement to increase the rights of the majority as against minorities. You do find many Jews in movements that seek to increase minority rights as against the majority.
In a dominantly white Christian America, it makes sense for Jews to side with other members of the Coalition of the Fringe.
I don’t know why white Protestants would want many outsiders in their country just as the Japanese don’t want many non-Japanese in their country.
Allegiance to shared values is nice, but in the end, ethnic groups only assimilate in the most superficial senses (such as language). They tend to act out their genetic imperatives and to be most loyal to those who most share their genes.
As internet commentator Maj. Kong put it: “Anti-Semitism is as natural to Western civilization as anti-Christianity is to Jewish civilization, Islamic civilization and Japanese civilization.”
Seventy years ago this past spring, in March 1946—several months after Japan surrendered to the Allies on August 15, 1945—the U.S. government closed the Tule Lake Segregation Center. It was the last of the 10 internment camps where people of Japanese ancestry, including American citizens, living on the West Coast were forcibly relocated during WWII.
Some of the internees had been released and allowed to return to the West Coast before Tule Lake was finally closed for good, and before Japan had even surrendered. When one former Tule Lake internee returned to his hometown of Seattle to take a custodial job, it made the Seattle Times—on May 3, 1945—complete with a photograph.
Why would such an everyday event make the newspaper? Even today, when editors constantly scramble for content to fill a 24-hour news cycle, this little vignette about a custodian seems like a nonstory. The answer to this puzzle lies in the largely forgotten context of the anti-Japanese hostility along the West Coast at war’s end, and in the personal stories of the returning internee and the man who hired him.
In the newspaper photo, the former internee, Eddie Otsuka, clad in rumpled work clothes, shares a smile with Rabbi Franklin Cohn in the lobby of Seattle’s Herzl Congregation. It was Cohn who hired Otsuka to care for the synagogue’s building and grounds. Cohn had been the congregation’s spiritual leader for three years: He had arrived in Seattle to take the pulpit in 1942, around the time when the federal government was driving Otsuka, along with the rest of the West Coast’s Nikkei (ethnically Japanese) population, behind barbed wire fences.
Many Washingtonians, Oregonians, and Californians were nothing short of delighted when the federal government exiled Otsuka and the rest of the Nikkei on spurious claims of military necessity and locked them up in internment camps. Racial suspicions and economic envies had made the immigrant Japanese and their U.S. citizen children unwelcome along the coast for decades. War with Japan provided a rationale for forcing them from their farms and businesses and relieving them of much of their wealth and property.
Just as many whites celebrated when the Nikkei left in 1942, many were incensed at the thought of their return in 1945. In January of that year, a Japanese family returning to Placer County, California, was greeted with gunshots at their house from passing cars and an attempt to blow up and burn down one of their farm buildings. (The perpetrators were arrested and then acquitted.) February and March saw shotgun blasts at or into the homes of returning Japanese families in Fowler, Fresno, Vasalia, and Madera, California. Vandals set fire to houses in Selma and San Jose and a Buddhist temple and a Japanese school in Delano. In various communities, Japanese graves were defaced. In Hood River, Oregon, returning Nikkei were denied service in most local stores, and the American Legion chapter stripped from its war memorial the names of the community’s 16 native-son soldiers who were Japanese-American. The threats and violence sometimes extended not just to the Nikkei but also to white people who dared to help them: In one notorious incident, graffiti was scrawled on the Los Angeles home of the celebrated scientist Linus Pauling’s home when he and his wife hired a returning Japanese-American veteran to do some gardening…
It is tempting to imagine that what Cohn did was part of a broader American Jewish commitment to easing the plight of the Nikkei. But it was not. While a number of individual Jews, especially a handful of lawyers, advocated for the rights of Japanese Americans as the war went on, American Jews as a group were notably silent about the removal and imprisonment of the Nikkei of the West Coast in 1942. As Ellen Eisenberg documents in her book The First to Cry Down Injustice?, Jewish groups along the West Coast chose to keep their heads down rather than speak out against a program of exile and imprisonment that in some ways resembled the treatment of their fellow Jews in Europe. They were more concerned with firming up their own somewhat tenuous position as American insiders than with reaching out to a group that had long been a prototype of the outsider.
Just as European gentiles rarely risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, Jews have rarely risked their social position, let alone lives, to save gentiles. Aggressive social activism by Jews only started en masse in the 1960s when Jews felt secure in their position in America.
There’s not much in Judaism that mandates that Jews stick their necks out to save non-Jews.
