2022-03-03
A scholar examines Eleanor Roosevelt’s Jewish advocacy during and after World War II in this history book.
While the inaction of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to protect Jewish refugees has been well documented over the past half-century, Sears turns readers’ attention to an unheralded voice of support for Jews: the leader’s wife, Eleanor. As the former executive director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institution and associate editor at the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, the author marshals an impressive body of evidence to make the case that Eleanor “was, without doubt, one of the great humanitarians of the twentieth century.” While perhaps occasionally overly fawning, this book is not an uncritical hagiography. Unsurprisingly, given her birth to New York City socialites, Eleanor inherited the antisemitism common to most of Manhattan’s elite at the turn of the century, which was reflected in her personal writings as a young adult. What made her “extraordinary,” according to Sears, was her “capacity to grow as a person” as she shed her biases. Befriending high-profile Jewish families as a member of the Democratic establishment, combined with her natural “humanitarian impulses” that “set her apart from most of her male contemporaries in the political and diplomatic worlds,” Eleanor emerged as one of the most prominent voices in the Roosevelt administration on behalf of Jewish refugees during the war. Serving as a liaison between her husband’s administration and groups like the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children, Eleanor helped secure Jewish activists access to State Department officials to plead their cases. Following the war, Eleanor remained a champion of displaced European Jews, becoming one of the most prominent and consistent Christian supporters of the creation of Israel. And though this backing of Israel was forged out of her altruistic approach to geopolitics that included a denunciation of British imperialism, it exposed her “cultural blinders” concerning Muslims, as she held a “paternalistic” and “demeaning” attitude toward Arabs. This generally positive but nuanced assessment of Eleanor also emphasizes her unfamiliarity with Jewish religious practices and holy days, as most of her Jewish colleagues and friends were secular. Drawing heavily on her personal papers as well as State Department and other administration documents, this well-researched book provides an intimate and complex portrait of Eleanor based on her private correspondence and behind-the-scenes activism. And while focused on her Jewish advocacy, the volume also bolsters an argument that not only was she “the most influential woman” in mid-20th-century America, but she also “was near the center of American power over a longer period” than any other player of the era, including her husband. As this book points out, while much has been written about Eleanor, there is still more work to be done in justly positioning her as a major figure of America’s domestic and international policies of the 1930s to 1950s. Written in an accessible style that provides ample historical context for Eleanor’s actions and beliefs, this book not only contributes a new perspective to scholarly debates surrounding modern Jewish history and the Roosevelt administration, but it also presents an engaging history for the general public. And though it does not hide its clear admiration for Eleanor’s leadership, it delivers a balanced analysis of her shortcomings.
A well-written, innovative account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s role in mid-20th-century geopolitics.
