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The "Jewish Threat": Anti-Semitic Politics of the U.S. Army

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It's hard to review this book simply because it is the only one that I know ever written on the subject of anti-Semitism and its influence on US Army poicy from the end of WWI through the end of WWII and into the 50's. It certainly is exhaustive - the research is incredible, and it is very well written. The author has dug up dozens of Army officers, mostly mid level careerists, who held anti-Jewish views. What Bendersky has failed to do was explain how a handful of anti-Semetic officers influenced American policy or changed the course of WWII.

Bendersky, for all of his obvious hatred toward his subjects, tells a compelling story. Bendersky's sense of intellectual and moral superiority and his contempt for his Northern European subjects ooze on every page. One of the advantages of being on the winning side in these intellectual battles is that Bendersky can safely assume that any statement by a U.S. military officer that reflects negatively on Jews or Judaism is a reflection of the prejudices and bigotry of the officer and has nothing to do with the actual behavior of Jews or the nature of Judaism.

Bendersky also makes it appear that reports of Jewish-Bolshevik atrocities are fantasies. Reports stated that Jewish-Bolshevik methods included not only seizure and destruction of property but also "barbarism and butchery". Included in the reports were photographs of "naked bodies with butchered flesh, hanging upside down from trees, while 'the Bolsheviki soldiers were laughing and grinning and standing about'". Bendersky writes as if such claims are unworthy of being rebutted, yet there is more than enough evidence that such things did happen. Indeed, the recently published Black Book of Communism not only documents the horrific slaughter of some 20 million Soviet citizens, the widespread torture, mass deportations, and imprisonment in appalling conditions, but reproduces the photos from 1919 of a naked Polish officer impaled through the anus hanging upside down from trees while Bolshevik soldiers are laughing and grinning and standing about.

But, in the end, one just has to believe the officers whose views he chronicles and not their chronicler.

Much has been written recently about the previously unexplored history of racism in the US Army. My own favorite was "An Incident at West Point" though several books about the famed Tuskegee Airmen have also received wide praise. What has been given less attention is the history of anti-Semitism in the US Army. With this work, Joseph Bendersky, a noted history professor, ends that glaring omission.

Bendersky documents several layers of anti-Semitism in the US army, through most of the 20th century. In the early part of the century, it was reflected in opposition to immigration based on the belief that Jews represented a "bad and unchristian" element. Moving forward, the author exposes the army subscribing to such infamous anti-Semitic canards as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" that argues for a world wide Jewish conspiracy whose goal is the destruction of Christianity.

These beliefs had great impact on American policy. A great example being General Marshall's opposition to the State of Israel, when he served in Truman's cabinet.

Many, myself included, will find the subject of this book disquieting. That is all the more reason that we are fortunate that an excellent scholar with meticulous attention to research and citations wrote this very fine work. It is an excellent source for those interested in the history of the Jews in America.

Anyone who identifies passionately with our American military and its veterans legion organizations, as I do, will be amazed at the US Army's long tradition of racialism and how it wasn't ever the subject of a major book until now. This book is by an historian who presents us with a rare opportunity to study that revelation, and he provides information he has collected from ten years of research. This history may well have been supressed for a time by those who better recognized its potential usefulness to the far right's ideology, and while it's well written there's still a pro-Zionist bias throughout. Here are a few chapters in the book for you to consider: 1) The Officers' Worldview, 1900-1939 2) Military Intelligence and "International Jewry," 1917-1919 3) Jews and Geopolitics, 1918-1924 4) The Nordic Defense of America, 1918-1924 5) Educating Officer Elites: The Army War College, 1919-1933 6) Quiet Continuities, 1925-1936 7) The Officer Corps and the Third Reich, 1933-1939 8) War College, War Clouds, 1933-1941 9) Officers and the Holocaust, 1940-1945 10) Survivors, Refugees, and the Birth of Israel, 1945-1949 11) Change and Continuity in The Postwar Era, 1945-1960 Joseph W. Bendersky is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in History at Virginia Commonwealth University, where he has taught for over twenty years. He is also the Book Review Editor for the Journal "Holocaust and Genocide Studies." Bendersky is the author of Carl Schmitt: Theorist for the Reich and History of Nazi Germany.

I would strongly recommend that anyone interested in this book read the review of this book by M. Goldin on H- Net.It is comprehensive and comes from someone who served in an Armed Forces combat unit during the Second World War.
This book chronicles the negative and prejudiced attitudes held by various figures of the Army throughout the past century.
These attitudes may have been important in effecting the lives of individual soldiers at the unit level.
They too may have had certain effect on overall U.S. policy in such matters as bombing the rail lines into Auschwitz.
There were also efforts to influence negatively American attitudes towards the emerging Jewish state in Israel.
This is in a way a sad and yet important book to read. It chronicles how that fundamental American ideal of equal treatment of the individual human being was violated by prejudice, and ignorance.