According to a growing number of academics and political extremists, the Jews have too much power in America.
This backlash against the so-called “Israel lobby” predictably has caused many to wonder whether the assertive voice of contemporary Jewish political activism is too loud, too brash and, most of all, too pushy in making its case.
Those who wonder what the world would be like if only those pushy Jews listened to their critics need not engage in science fiction. All you need is a history lesson about how American Jewish organizations and leaders — the predecessors of those now considered the take-no-prisoners cornerstone of “the lobby” — acted during the Holocaust. And to do that, a visit to an off-Broadway theater — if you’re visiting New York City — will do nicely.
In Bernard Weinraub’s new play “The Accomplices” at the New Group’s Acorn Theater on Manhattan’s 42nd Street, the eminent Rabbi Stephen Wise is confronted by an obnoxious young foreigner. The young man who goes by the name of Peter Bergson is frustrated by the unwillingness of the most influential American Jew of his era to use his power to speak up to save European Jews slated for death by Hitler’s Nazis.
Explaining his reluctance to confront an American president he considers a “god,” Wise says American Jews are just too scared to make a stink about rescue. “We don’t shout,” he said. “We work quietly. We don’t draw attention to ourselves.”
Bergson was the assumed name of Hillel Kook, a member of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the pre-Israel underground resistance movement. And he’ll have none of it. A stranger to America, he found the element of culture most foreign to him was the supine attitude of an American Jewry living in comparative security.
He could not comprehend how deeply intimidated Jews and their leaders were by American anti-Semitism. While Bergson saw only a prosperous group who need not fear the assaults of cossacks, even a powerful figure like Wise trembled at the thought of the hatred expressed by radio personality and anti-Semite Father Coughlin.
“Don’t judge me!” Wise implores as Bergson prepares to launch a noisy public campaign.
Sadly, for Wise, posterity has done little but that ever since.
Weinraub, a longtime reporter for the New York Times who retired to try his hand at playwriting, may be exploring familiar territory for scholars who have been picking at this ugly scab on our communal conscience for decades. Nevertheless, his riveting play has the ability to tell this story for an audience that may never crack a history book. In resurrecting this confrontation for the stage, he has tapped into a message that is as timely as it is dramatic.
“The Accomplices” manages to make for good theater almost in spite of Weinraub’s determination to tell a rather complicated chapter of history. The rapidly paced dialogue and scenes, sprinkled liberally with humor and irony, move the action along relentlessly. The ensemble cast (who take multiple rolls in the spare production) ably assist in the writer’s task of making the personalities portrayed on stage into living, breathing characters rather than wax figures in a historic tableau.
Veteran character actor David Margulies (best known to television audiences as Tony Soprano’s Jewish lawyer on the HBO series) deserves credit for bringing a keenly nuanced humanity to the role of Stephen Wise. No cardboard villain, he gives us a man who is aware of his own egotism and jealousy, but also genuinely afraid of what would happen if Jews speak up.
Daniel Sauli’s Bergson is also no perfect hero. Like the real Hillel Kook, who spent the rest of his life tormented by the failure to save more lives, his triumph is as much a defeat as it was a victory. For him, the verdict on his activism was that the Germans may have lost to the Allies but won their war with the Jews. As he says in the play’s final scene, subsequent genocides have shown that it is easy to get away with mass murder.
In posing the question of whether Roosevelt and Long were literally accomplices to the Holocaust, Weinraub is bound to stir up anger from their defenders. Yet the dwindling group of kibbitzers willing to defend Roosevelt’s appalling record on the Holocaust persist in their willingness to ignore history like some modern-day, flat-earth society.
But more fair-minded observers are bound to ask whether the author has taken Wise’s timorousness out of context. Can we really judge Wise’s angst about anti-Semitism? Likewise, can we judge other Jews of his time, such as the owners of the New York Times, who buried the news of the Holocaust in their pages?
To that, the answer must be yes. As much as we may sympathize with the dilemma of World War II-era American Jewry, history’s verdict on their failure is not in question. Just as the memory of that failure helped inspire a generation of Soviet Jewry activists, it needs to inform us today as we regard issues like genocide in Darfur.
In the end, Weinraub and his audience have no choice but to “judge” Stephen Wise even as we identify with his fear of being singled out.
As we observe another day of remembrance for the Holocaust, the obligation to remember the “accomplices” —as well as those, like Peter Bergson, who had the courage to cry out against murder— must not be obscured by time or political fashion.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia. He can be contacted via e-mail at: [email protected].