Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Dr. Aviva Weingarten has written a well-researched and fascinating study about two interesting subjects.
First part of her study deals with Jewish organisations and she claims that Jewish organisations such as ADL and AJC were against communism and tried to destroy the old legend about "Jewish bolshevism" while simultaneously opposed the methods of senator Joseph R. McCarthy, who "was never wise enough to understand the Jewish organisations' overriding commitment to civil rights". To demolish the "Jewish bolshevism" myth, the Jewish organisations had good connections to media and tried to influence producers to make programs showing Jews as anti-communists. Not mentioned in the book, AJC even co-operated with producers of an obviously anti-communist movie "I Married a Communist" (1947) to make sure that nothing in the bad communists even remotely would give an impression that they were of Jewish origin.
But to be honest, the impression that AJC didn't fight communism too hard is easy to understand in the light that it co-operated with marxist psychoanalysts such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and helped them to publish "The Authoritarian Personality" (1951). Jewish pro-McCarthyite journalist Ralph de Toledano described this work as "the authority for smearing 'fascists' and 'anti-Semites those whose only sin was opposition to the New Left".
The second part of the book deals with senator McCarthy and Jews in his world vision. After presenting a group of pro-McCarthy Jews, Dr. Weingarten also documents well with case studies (Anna Rosenberg, VOA Hebrew desk, Fort Monmouth, Irving Peress) that McCarthy had no anti-Semitic tendencies and "never aimed his arrows at Jews merely because they were Jews". In fact, McCarthy was philo-semite many times, and during the Peress affair, McCarthy used the case of certain Sidney Rubinstein as a case study of a patriotic ex-communist soldier who was treated unfairly by the army.
One positive side of this study was how fair it is towards senator McCarthy. The author even goes so far as to claim that "McCarthy's claims that communists had infiltrated the Administration ... were well based.". In fact, only a handful of McCarthy's targets are found in the VENONA. Stanton Evans' book "Blacklisted by History" makes a plausible case about security risks, but unfortunately it is not mentioned at all in this book.
The publisher should have read this more carefully for typos. The name of a VOA worker was not "Harris Reed" but Reed Harris (p. 118), and the several sentences that begin chapter 4 does not seem to make any sense ("any opposition to communism was seen automatically as anti-McCarthyism"). These minor flaws don't harm the thesis of this book and I hope will be corrected in the future editions.
I personally would have liked to hear more about pro-McCarthy Jews, such as journalist Ralph de Toledano, journalist Willi Schlamm (who wrote preface to pro-McCarthy classis "McCarthy & His Enemies") and author Lionel Lokos (who wrote the detailed study "Who Promoted Peress?" that was cheered even by anti-McCarthy author David Oshinsky).
Summa summarum: interesting, readable and informative. Mazel Tov, Aviva!
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