The Scared and the Doomed: The Jewish Establishment vs. the Six Million

E.R. Zimmerman was Dean of Arts at Lakehead University, Thunder Bay, Ontario.

The Polish-born and Western European-educated author, M.J. Nurenberger, worked for many years as a journalist, editor, and publisher of different Yiddish newspapers in Europe, the United States, and Canada. During World War II, Nurenberger observed, as a journalist, “the Jewish Civil War” raging in the United States. This book presents his memoirs of this experience as well as his account of various events occurring between February 1939 and May 1945. According to his recollections, a fierce struggle was fought between the American Jewish Establishment and various Zionists, on one side, and a small group of Jews, organized as the American delegation of IRGUN, a dissident splinter group of the Jewish defence organization, HAGANAH, over the issue of rescuing Europe’s Jews from the clutches of Hitler and his Nazis. The IRGUN group, inspired by the Hebrew proverb that saving lives is more important than obeying rules, advocated that Jewish lives be saved either by arranging “deals” with willing Nazi leaders, or by declaring all Jews prisoners of war, or by bombing the railways feeding the crematoria of Auschwitz and Maidanek, or by bombing these camps and especially the ovens. Nurenberger accuses the American Jewish Establishment and assorted Zionists of having utterly and deliberately failed to induce President Roosevelt and his government, which included many anti-Semites, to implement policies and actions that would have saved many Jewish lives in the German KZs (concentration camps). Instead, Nurenberger argues, the American Jewish Establishment and its Zionist supporters were obsessed by fears of a rise in American anti-Semitism and by the prospect of winning the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine. Whereas the established Jews-Zionists called for military victory first and vilified the IRGUN, the latter explored all avenues for rescuing Jewish lives.

This book offers a painful picture of political bickering and infighting at a time when one might have assumed that all segments of Jewish politics would unite in saving Jewish lives. The author’s vehement and passionate criticisms of the pusillanimity of the American Jewish-Israeli Zionist establishment for its adherence to old-fashioned modes of Jewish behaviour in the face of extraordinary circumstances makes the reader wonder how fair and objective Nurenberger’s retrospective treatment of his adversaries actually is. His book adds a further dimension to our understanding of the Holocaust; however, it is this reviewer’s fervent hope that it will not inspire the professional anti-Semitic simplifiers to produce yet another obfuscating version of the Holocaust. This book reveals the deep tragic bitterness of those who were affected by the Holocaust as helpless survivors.