22 - Abraham H. Feinberg, ‘America’s Hour of Decision’, 13 September 1939, Rockford, Illinois

Summary

AS IN THE YEARS 1870, 1914, and 2001, the High Holy Days of 1939 were overshadowed by the outbreak of war. By Rosh Hashanah, much of Poland had already fallen to the German onslaught, while Russian troops had invaded and occupied its eastern sector. Britain and France were gearing up to fight an enemy that appeared if anything more formidable than twenty-five years earlier.

For some American rabbis, the mood was similar to that of September 1914 and September 1870, when, as we have seen, many felt that the outbreak of war among the civilized nations of Europe itself reflected a catastrophic failure of humane values. The opening words of Israel Levinthal's sermon on the first day of Rosh Hashanah reflects a profound sense of gloom:

We find ourselves today in one of the saddest moments in world history, and certainly in Jewish history. The impossible has come to pass. It is only twenty-one years since the close of the last world war. We had imagined that the world had come of age—that it would know better. But no—the world refuses to learn, and the result is that it finds itself once more in the throes of destruction … ‘The world is hanging on nothingness’ ( Job 26: 7) … It is hanging on a thread; any moment it may fall in ruins. All civilization is threatened with annihilation!

Yet there was a significant difference: now a war had been proclaimed against a nation that represented in its ideology and its behaviour a repudiation of all they believed in. This time there could be no question of neutrality; Hitler's belligerent, aggressive, antisemitic Nazi regime had to be defeated. But what was to be America's role in the war?

I had long wondered what American rabbis were saying in their September 1939 sermons on this issue: were they calling for the United States to join its former allies in the effort to defeat and destroy Hitler's Germany? The short answer is: they were not. One of the most startling discoveries in my investigation of the material for this book was the consistently anti-interventionist position taken in the American Jewish pulpit at this time. It is not that these rabbis were indifferent to what was happening in Europe.