Courtesy of Samuel Klausner

Samuel Klausner with his flight crew.

American Jews learned more than the bitter lessons of Jewish political impotence from the Second World War. They acquired new perspectives on themselves and their country through their participation in the armed services of the United States. American wartime propaganda declared the struggle against the Axis to be between democracy and fascism, between the values of equality and those of racism, between freedom and totalitarianism. Patriotic fervor also enlisted most American religious groups. Shortly after the war in Europe began, the president of the Jewish Theological Seminary established the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion and Their Relation to the Democratic Way of Life. The conference included 79 leading American thinkers and religious figures. Seeking to create a framework for the "preservation of democracy and intellectual freedom" in response to the rise of European totalitarianism, the conference proclaimed that American ideals were rooted in biblical tradition and sustained by the biblical religions of Christianity and Judaism. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition of democracy gained widespread currency as the American alternative to fascism. American fascist and anti-Semitic groups had preempted the term "Christian" in the 1930s. "Judeo-Christian" suggested an antifascist basis for democratic values. The idea "was to invoke a common faith for a united democratic front."

As GIs learned, the American way was not supposed to include prejudice and discrimination. On his way home from California to his wife and family in New York City, Bernard Zaritsky felt his spirits soar, until he got off the train in New Mexico and bought a paper. "In it I found that one hundred thousand Jews were being kicked around in the old football game, politics. The Arabs threatened to revolt if the Jews were let into Palestine.... [A]nd the war, supposedly over, was just beginning for these people ... my people." Then Zaritsky headed for a store to buy a glass of milk when he saw the sign: "No Jews, No Soldiers, No Negroes, No Dogs, Allowed in these Premises!" He concluded bitterly: "We didn't win any war.... This wasn't the United States of America." Although the war failed to eradicate anti-Semitism in the United States, wartime propaganda discredited it and encouraged Jews to oppose it.

Even Jews remaining at home identified the American victory as a Jewish one, feeling strengthened by it. The legal scholar Robert Burt remembers how as a youngster he celebrated V-E Day in Philadelphia with his maternal grandfather, a "relentlessly secular" Russian Jewish immigrant. When the German surrender was announced in May 1945, he writes, "My grandfather immediately went into his basement and returned arms filled with small American flags, party hats, horns, and other noisemakers and bags of paper confetti. We dressed for the celebration and went out into the street, where he outfitted other neighborhood children." Burt's account would not be unusual, except that his grandfather later admitted "on the day the war began he had bought all of these supplies and stored them for the inevitable day when America would win the war. And the relevant triumph for him," Burt recognized, "was not the final end, not when the Japanese surrendered four months later. The victory was in Europe. It was also, as I think he saw it, a victory over Europe." Over a Europe that had persecuted Jews for centuries.

The era of American Jewry
Perhaps the war's mixed messages to American Jews complemented each other. If Jews could be targeted for destruction and could not rely upon the world's democracies for a timely rescue, then they had to rely upon themselves. The logic of the Jewish need for independent political power--a state of their own--pressed upon American Jews. A United Jewish Appeal activist after he left the service, Peppercorn thought that almost everyone was "motivated toward the creation of a Jewish state." He had no doubt that it was "the solution" to the DP camps. The war also gave American Jews a new self-confidence. As Americans, Jews could rely upon themselves; they could fight anti-Semitism and win. The American victory in the war was their victory as much as anyone else's. The dawn of the American century marked the start of their own self-confident era, American Jewry's era.

The war had disrupted American Jewish society, fueling new movements, releasing previously untapped energies, exploding the boundaries of a provincial urban world. Participation in the service interrupted the lives of many young Jews. Some found it impossible to return home to pick up the tangled threads of family, work and education that had been attenuated during their military years. Their war experience had unsettled them; they had seen too much to resume their mundane lives where they had left them. "One quick furlough home" to Chicago convinced writer Clancy Sigal "that my beloved old neighborhood was a slummy shtetl, my hangout pals narrow-minded schlumps. Along with practically the entire West Side younger generation which fled either to Chicago's northern suburbs or to California, I took off without a backward glance." Like Sigal, these footloose young men sought greener pastures, a fresh future filled with promise, a chance to try something new freed from familiar constraints. They remembered the other America they had glimpsed during training, or en route to the Pacific war theater, or perhaps while recovering from a wound. With a brash self-confidence they decided to pioneer thousands of miles away from home. Eager for another adventure, they determined to take a chance, to rely upon themselves.

This self-confidence appeared in many aspects of postwar American Jewish life. It not only fueled vast migrations of American Jews to the suburbs and to such new cities as Miami and Los Angeles, but it also restructured household relationships around the nuclear family unit. The GI Bill sent many more Jews to college than would have been able to go had the war not intervened in their lives. For those American Jews of the wartime generation, the acquisition of a college education hastened their social mobility. The self-understanding Jewish GIs took away from their wartime experience encouraged in many a deep commitment to the State of Israel as the "answer" to the Holocaust even as it led most Jews away from ideological politics into the liberal Democratic camp. It strengthened as well a religious consensualism among Jews, most visible in the rapid growth of the Reform and Conservative movements, and tolerance for those Jews who were both more and less religious than the consensual middle. In an essay written in 1946, Abraham Duker argued that the army chaplaincy "furnished a laboratory for the blending of the religious groupings." He found a pattern of worship emerging that discarded both extreme Orthodoxy and extreme Reform but included mixed pews, head covering for men, English prayers, and Hebrew hymns sung in traditional melodies.

Perceived Jewish weakness and failure to rescue their European brethren shaped an intense concern for unity among Jewish communal leaders; it became the watchword of a generation that also developed communal structures to implement its desire for unity and cooperation. A deep dedication to democracy, equality and individualism, understood as core American values opposed to fascism, permeated much of American Jewish culture: religious school curriculums, summer camp programs, defense agency goals, women's organizations' activities.