Jews and the New Deal Leonard Dinnerstein

Forty years ago no Jewish organization would have published an article on this subject. Not because my remarks are inaccurate - they are not. Not because I am highly critical of anyone - I am not. And not because Jews would have been quite displeased about the information in this talk; in fact, they would have been quite proud of it. But forty years ago Jews in the United States lived with - and feared the increase of - intense American anti-Semitism. There were enough critics of the so-called “Jew Deal” who saw many of the accomplishments of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first two administrations as Jewish or Communist (for large numbers of people the terms were interchangeable) inspired. Thus to avoid giv- ing hostile people any ammunition, Jewish organizations generally refrained from identifying publicly the large number of coreli- gionists employed by the federal government and twice, in 1934 and 1942, Jewish publications devoted full length articles showing how few Jews were actually involved with the vast network of govern- mental agencies.’ Even in the 1950’s and 1960’s, when James Mac- Gregor Burns, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Frank Freidel, and William E. Leuchtenburg published major volumes on the New Deal,? none of these historians played up the significance of the Jewish influ- ence upon FDR. It is only within the past decade when ethnicity be- came fashionable that scholars have acknowledged the large Jewish ‘component in the formulation and execution of New Deal policies.?

To understand the relationship between the Jews and Franklin D. Roosevelt, one must comprehend several things. First, the New Deal years coincided with a period of intense bigotry in American society and the Jews were victimized more than at any other time