American Jewish historian Peter Novick writes in his book The Holocaust in American Life:
Just as Jewish groups’ principled declarations against totalitarianism did not prevent them from seeking entry for Jews who had been Communists, so the Christian groups’ equally sincere hostility to totalitarianism did not prevent them from seeking admission for their coreligionists who were former Nazis.
…One constraint was fear of confirming a long-standing and widely held negative perception of Jews. No lesson in comparative theology was as assiduously taught in Sunday schools across the United States as the contrast between the Old Testament God of Vengeance and the New Testament God of Love and Forgiveness. Recent experience had shown its continued currency. Toward the end of the war, President Roosevelt had casually endorsed, then quickly repudiated, a plan advanced by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau for the permanent deindustrialization (“pastoralization”) of Germany. Secretary of War Henry Stimson privately called the Morgenthau Plan “semitism gone wild for vengeance.”
…The popular association of Jews with Communism dated from the Bolshevik Revolution. Most of the “alien agitators” deported from the United States during the Red Scare after World War I had been Jews. In the interwar years the Communist Jew was a staple of anti-Semitic propaganda in both the United States and Europe….
Lucy Dawidowicz — later well known as an historian of the Holocaust, but in these years the American Jewish Committee’s expert on the percentage of Jews among ‘hostile witnesses’ before various investigative bodies. Jews, she found, often made up 75 percent or more of the totals. Worst of all, producing something near panic among mainstream Jewish organizations, was the number of Jews figuring in espionage prosecutions: the Amerasia case, the Canadian Spy Ring, the Judith Coplon case — culminating in that ultimate disaster for Jewish public relations, the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, Harry Gold, and David Greenglass.
Jewish organizations worked frantically to combat the Jew-Communist equation, but it was a difficult brief. They could insist, correctly, that only a small proportion of Jews were Communists, or even well disposed toward the Soviet Union. But it was also correct, and becoming manifest, that a great many — perhaps most — American Communists in these years were Jews.
…Jewish organizations, throughout the fifties and well into the sixties, worked on a variety of fronts to prevent, or at least limit, the association of Jews with Communism in the public mind. Their principal co-operative venture was the ‘Hollywood Project,’ in which they jointly employed a West Coast representative who lobbied movie producers to avoid any unsympathetic representations of Jews. A good deal of this lobbying dealt with the Jew-Communist issue. The producer of I Married a Communist promised to see that no Communist character had a ‘name that can even remotely be construed as Jewish…
The inward turn on the part of much of American Jewish leadership, their insistence that ‘Is it good for the Jews?’ be the first, if not the only, question that Jews ask themselves — inevitably mandated a rightward turn as well. By the 1970s Jews were preeminent among the ‘haves’ in American society, and the gap between Jews and non-Jew, in income as well as in representation in all elite positions, widened over subsequent decades. Jews had everything to lose and nothing to gain from the more equal distribution of rewards which had been the aim of liberal social policies … The political movement called neo-conservatism was almost exclusively a Jewish affair; Commentary, published by the American Jewish Committee, became America’s best-known conservative magazine.
…The hard-line anti-Soviet articles in its monthly magazine, Commentary, were, according to Norman Podhoretz, “part of a secret program to demonstrate that not all Jews were communists.” One of the [American Jewish] Committee’s staff members secured agreements from Time and Life and several New York newspapers not to publish letters from readers commenting on the Jewishness of accused Communists…
One Jewish official complained to a colleague that American Jews were “not taking anywhere near the measures or using the efforts in combating Communism as they do against Nazism.”
…One should never confuse the calculated public posture of Jewish officialdom with the “around the kitchen table” feelings of American Jewry, and especially not with respect to cold war inhibitions about discussing the Holocaust… Without official sanction, it could not become a public communal emblem; without official reinforcement, it tended, at least for many, to decline in salience.
