Up From El-Alamein
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

One of our favorite stories is told about an adulterous woman who stayed too long with her paramour across the river and missed the last ferry home. She beseeches the ferryman to row her across. He refuses because it is getting dark. She returns to the home of her paramour and begs him to escort her across the bridge, which is infested with thieves, but he is afraid of the scandal. So she races, alone, over to the bridge, where she is set upon by thieves and killed.
The question is who is at fault? Is it the abusive husband, who drives his wife into the arms of another man? Or the operator of the ferry, who refuses to help a woman in distress? Or her lover, who lacks the courage to escort her across the bridge? Or is it the fault of the faithless woman herself, in that it is she who breaks her marriage vows? The answer is that the fault belongs to the thieves who set upon the woman as she crosses the bridge.
This is how we feel in respect of a dispute over Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Holocaust. It is being triggered by the publication in the Forward of a historical scoop by the former district attorney of New York County, Robert Morgenthau, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin, Frank Tuerkheimer. They relate how Roosevelt helped save the Jews of northern Africa and enabled the birth of the state of Israel.
Part of the scoop is an unpublished manuscript by one of FDR’s war undersecretaries, Robert P. Patterson, describing how FDR diverted 300 Sherman tanks and 100 self-propelled field guns to Suez for delivery to the British. The Desert Fox, Erwin Rommel, fresh off his victory at the Battle of Tobruk in 1941, was headed for the Holy Land, trailed by an SS detachment assigned to kill the local Jews. Roosevelt’s aid, in response to a request from Winston Churchill, made possible the British defeat of Rommel at the Battle of El Alamein in 1942. That set the stage for the emergence of the Jewish state. Herzl’s dream wasn’t part of Roosevelt’s war aims, but the Morgenthau-Tuerkheimer piece is an illuminating tale of how Roosevelt prioritized the war against Nazi Germany even in the face of post-Pearl Harbor pressure to go after Japan.
Their dispatch was set down by one of the leading newspapermen on the Jewish beat, Jonathan Tobin, who is the managing editor of Commentary, as “wrongheaded,” not to mention “foolish and patently disingenuous” and “an absurd distortion of the historical record.” In a second piece responding to a letter by Messrs. Morgenthau and Tuerkheimer, Mr. Tobin invoked the historian Lucy Dawidowicz, whose book “The War Against the Jews,” is a seminal work.
We perked up at Dawidowicz. It happens that portrait of the historian hangs in the editorial rooms of the Sun, and in the years before she died we had several conversations with her about Roosevelt. It is true, as Mr. Tobin writes, that she liked to point out that the Nazis largely won their war against the Jews of Europe. But she had little patience for the argument that FDR was a villain in our struggle. She devoted a whole chapter in her book “What is the Use of Jewish History?” to the question of whether America could have rescued Europe’s Jews.
“American Jews were the most interventionist of all Americans and Roosevelt’s most ardent supporters,” Dawidowicz wrote. “They knew that he, more than any other American political leader, understood the threat that National Socialist Germany posed to Jews and to the civilized world.” She went on, “American Jews were not deluded in their fierce devotion to Roosevelt. Before the Nazi state began to carry out the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Question,’ most American Jews agreed with him that the surest way to help the European Jews was to defeat Hitler on the battlefield and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was Doctor Win-the-War.”
FDR, Dawidowicz wrote, “remained committed to the priority and primacy of the war against Germany, despite the urgings of some of his military advisers to redirect America’s major military effort toward the war in the East against Japan.” So it seems that what Messrs. Morgenthau and Tuerkheimer were doing, and it’s no small thing, is bring in new evidence that underscores the Dawidowicz thesis. In her book she takes a dim view of a book Mr. Tobin praises, David Wyman’s “The Abandonment of the Jews.” She said it did “a disservice to the historical Roosevelt and to the history of that period.”
It happens that we are not aware of any newspaper that has nursed a livelier admiration than the Sun for the Revisionist Zionists of the Bergson Group. They were named for Peter Bergson, nom de guerre of Hillel Kook, who was sent to America by Jabotinsky to try to rouse the Roosevelt administration to mount a rescue of European Jewry. We covered it a few years ago when Bernard Weinraub’s important play, “The Accomplices,” was staged at New York. The march of Orthodox rabbis, which the Bergsonites rallied at Washington in October 1943, is one of the proudest Jewish moments of the era.
We’re less inclined to argue about the past, though, than to focus on the current crisis. Once again a war against is underway against the Jews, and there is a premium on clear thinking. Here we worry less about President Roosevelt and more about President Obama and, for that matter, the Republican field that is shaping up. All too often in the war that erupted on September 11, 2001, the Democrats were the party of doubt and the Republicans, led by President Bush, were the party that was prepared to use our war powers. The lines between them have lately been growing too blurry for our taste.
Throughout this whole period, Mr. Morgenthau has been a hawk among the Democrats, a particularly staunch supporter of the Jewish state. He has struck us as a man obsessed with a truth Lucy Dawidowicz understood — that, as she put it in her book on the uses of history, “a Jewish state would have made a difference.” Today the question is where our politicians stand as Israel prepares for the possibility that it will have to strike an Iran that is animated by the same hatreds that consumed Europe in the last century. One thing both Mr. Morgenthau and his critics at Commentary undoubtedly understand is that, whatever failings there are among our leaders, the mullahs in Iran are the villains on the bridge.