The Strange Death of Comedy
Tell a joke now and who knows who you might offend? Identity politics is taking the fun out of just about everything. This is – no fooling – a very serious problem. Actor/Comedian Owen Benjamin explains why and what needs to be done about it.
The U.N is running out of money. Sad indeed. Trump would love nothing better than to convert it into condos and a parking garage. (See 1 below.)
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Hamas exploring new destructive drone technology. (See 2 below.)
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My friend, Lt. Col. Allen West (ret) was interviewed last night by Mark Levin. In his quiet way, Allen continues to make common sense. I continue to wish he would re-enter politics. We need more of his kind.
Unlike establishment conservatives, who have enjoyed swimming in the mud of DC, and here I think of George Will and his kind, Allen remains a refreshing breath of fresh air and more so because he epitomizes the best of an offspring raised in the traditional black family that believed serving our nation, even though they were deprived of its blessing. The family were church goers, believed in the necessity of a good education and accepting responsibility.
Allen is very clear eyed when it comes to China and the threat that nation poses. He also discussed and lamented our lack of leadership continuity just as I have of late.
Allen's service in Congress encompassed Trump's Florida residence and he came to know the president and he also discussed his thoughts about Trump's performance to date. He believes Trump is building our nation's interests with what he terms are the new Europe, ie. Poland and other former Russian satellite nations.
Levin is a solid interviewer and Allen is a very literate and accomplished interviewee. Very informative. (See 3 below.).
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I believe Trump haters are incapable of sound reasoning, of being objective because their views are clouded and distorted.
No you do not have to buy the messages of the op eds in my previous memo but it should cause one to think about the fact that there could be an alternative view one should consider.
If they applied for a consulting job with me, I seriously doubt I could hire any of them.
I get a lot of e mails from those who hate Trump and they defend their views by expressing more hatred, more distortions, more attacks on his avowed vulgarities and ego driven persona while totally denying anything he has accomplished because, they assert, everything he has done will either fail and/or is totally destructive.
True compassionate liberals should be delighted people are working again and have a path toward dignity and self worth. They don't have to take 4.1 GDP as a slap at Obama, though it might be. They should rejoice in the fact that America is on the move again but no, they argue it is fake statistics that will not be repeated.
They should be joyful that N Korea is not launching missiles and perhaps the prospect of war has dimmed. But no, they rant about Trump's attacks on "Fat Boy."
One would think they would want to see a fairer and more level playing field when it comes to trade and that American technology should not be stolen but once again they see the fly on the wall.
It is hard to take them seriously so I do not and that simply makes them more frustrated because their intellectual arguments/premises are based on crap and are being ignored.
I remind my readers, you are never compelled to accept the premise of others if you disagree, nor should you. If you do, then you are arguing on quicksand and that is a sure way to lose. I do not believe my role in life is to accommodate fools and agree simply to avoid friction. I have two choices: walk away and explain why or stand my ground and respond. Depending upon who I am engaged with I employ both approaches. For those I walk away from, after explaining why, I often fell I have hurt their sensitivities and leave them disappointed having to cope with their bruised feelings. For those I am willing to stand toe to toe with let the better argument prevail.
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No this is not the McDonald the hamburger company is named for but Amb. McDonald who had to put up with a lot of crock from FDR and not the Ray Kroc kind. (See 4 below.)
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Dick
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1)The United Nations Is In Big Trouble
Trump effect?
It is being reported that the UN is hurting for cash. They are calling on member countries to tender their payments or they risk going broke.
According to Town Hall:
Trump has threatened to pull certain types of funding from the UN as questions arise about the necessity of the organization.United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres is sounding the alarm to members about the world body’s “troubling financial situation,” urging them to pay up.
“Our cash flow has never been this low so early in the calendar year, and the broader trend is also concerning; we are running out of cash sooner and staying in the red longer,” he said in a letter to staff, reports FoxNews.com.
...
“Late payment has an impact obviously on our cash flow. It may have an impact on our ability to deliver mandates,” he told reporters.
One former U.S. diplomat at the U.N. suggested other member states may be dragging their feet on payments over the perception that the U.S. has backed away from its commitments.
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2) A new Hamas drone threat to Israel?
Honest Reporting
Hamas has been experimenting with drones dropping explosives — on Iron Dome batteries, and possibly other targets. Ynet explores the problem and what’s at stake:
3)
Honor, Dignity, Victim
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++An accurate hit on an Iron Dome battery is one of Hamas’s clear objectives, as this isn’t merely another prestigious target, but a symbol—much like infiltration into an Israeli community, kidnapping a soldier or sabotaging the obstacle Israel is building on the border. And the simplest way to get to the Iron Dome batteries is by launching a drone that could drop an explosive on them, or blow up itself.The drones launched toward that community in May were likely the “pilot” for an operational plan. To Hamas, the explosive-carrying drones and the “suicide” drones’ main job is to cause mass casualties or to accurately hit military targets. If Israel causes mass casualties in the strip, Hamas in response will launch the explosive drones towards Israeli communities on the Gaza border. It could hit a basketball court in the middle of a game, or a beach on a hot summer day. In the Zikim area, for example, several drones from Gaza were found this year. Another possible scenario is for such a drone to fly over an Israeli sniper position and drop a small explosive, like a grenade, in response to sniper fire on Palestinian rioters.
3)
Honor, Dignity, Victim
A Tale of Three Moral Cultures
Sociologists Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning have produced the first systematic theoretical analysis of the moral culture of “victimhood” emerging on university campuses. Central to their interesting and thought-provoking investigation is the claim that moral cultures tend to take one of three forms: honor cultures, dignity cultures and victim cultures.
Honor cultures emerge when a centralized state authority is not present or not legitimate and when people are extremely materially vulnerable. Under these conditions, people will take offense very easily, grow quickly fearful, and engage in higher rates of defensive, pre-emptive aggression as well as vigilante justice in order to settle their disputes. In the worst-case scenario, this pre-emptive aggression can develop into bloody feuds enveloping whole families, gangs or lineages. Physical bravery, deferential respect to the powerful and an unwillingness to appear weak and vulnerable consequently become paramount values.
Citing Steven Pinker, Donald Black, and others,1 Campbell and Manning then suggest that slowly over the last 500 years, state authority (police, courts and jails) has come to supplant vigilante justice as a powerful and reasonably fair system of adjudicating disputes regardless of their severity. Societies over the last 500 years have not only become more reliant on state authority to resolve disputes, but also materially wealthier due to machine technology and market economies, relatively more equitable in terms of the distribution of resources, power and prestige, as well as more diverse due to the formal legal rights and benefits extended to women and minorities.
In a dignity culture, people in this more modern form of society may resort to legal authority when disputes and wrongdoings are sufficiently severe, but otherwise they will make efforts to privately resolve disputes in a non-violent manner. In such a society, all citizens are assumed to have a sense of dignity and self-restraint, and everyone is expected to, at least at first, give the benefit of the doubt to a disputant to see if a conflict can be resolved peacefully. However, Campbell and Manning contend that when state authority begins to exert monopolizing control over a population of increasingly diverse, legally “equal” people, a victim culture may emerge.
Victim cultures share in common with honor cultures the sensitivity to slights or insults, but whereas those in an honor culture might try to retaliate (physically or otherwise), people in a victim culture will instead appeal to a powerful, omnipresent state/legal authority. Classic examples are Mao’s China and Stalin’s Russia. In contrast to honor cultures that expect victims to be strong and stern enough to defend themselves, and dignity cultures that expect victims to be calm and charitable when in a dispute or disagreement, victim cultures emphasize how complainants are emotionally or physically fragile, vulnerable, and weak. In order to have high status in a victim culture, one must perfect and dramatize a personal “narrative of suffering.”2Confidently espousing one’s own weakness, frailty, and suffering might seem, perhaps, dishonorable or shameful from an honor culture perspective, or gratuitous and self-absorbed from a dignity culture perspective.
Campbell and Manning find this victim culture emerging anew in Western society, particularly on university campuses and especially on elite ivy-league schools. These places contain all of the components necessary for a victim culture to arise: (1) campuses tend to be racially/ethnically diverse (relative to other institutions in society), (2) an ethic of equal treatment under a shared identity (“student”) is emphasized, (3) students tend to come from relatively comfortable middle-class backgrounds, and (4) universities are largely run by powerful administrative bureaucracies prone to stretching their authority (in the form of Title IX offices, student conduct offices, or multicultural/diversity offices, for example). These administrative bureaucracies serve as “state”-like authorities on university campuses, justifying their existence through the allegedly necessary enforcement of speech codes, dress codes, sex codes, etc. And, indeed, this administrative bureaucracy grows larger by the year—over the last half decade or so, faculty and student enrollment has increased by about 50 percent, while administrative staff has increased a staggering 240 percent.3
Victim Culture’s Discontents
As sociologists, Campbell and Manning are interested not only in the correlates and structure of “victim culture,” but also in the consequences of the spread of this culture’s influence. They point out early in the first chapter that seeking out offense in order to complain to third parties and garner support was actually, up until recently, considered a distinctly unusual and non-normative way to handle minor frustrations. For adults, the authors argue, mainstream modern American society has expected a degree of thick skin, restraint, and a willingness to charitably interpret the intentions of others (dignity culture).
By contrast, contemporary victim culture narratives assert that institutions in the West are cesspools of white supremacist, patriarchal, transphobic, exploitive oppression, and therefore anyone who is perceived to be “in power” (the usual culprit is heterosexual white males) must therefore be benefitting from or perpetuating systems of heterosexist white supremacist misogynist fascism. But here is the twist: anyone who takes offense or considers themselves “harmed” in some way by those in power, and who is bold enough to complain to authorities about it, is therefore a messenger of emancipatory justice. As Campbell and Manning explain the process: “People identified as victims thus receive recognition, support, and protection. In these settings victimhood becomes increasingly attractive” (106). To take offense ever more easily is to demonstrate a righteous eagerness to vanquish evil.
As a result, according to Campbell and Manning, people in victim cultures engage in competitive victimhood displays. They will relay true, semi-true, and sometimes completely fabricated “atrocity stories,” about how people and institutions (whites, men, media, government, family, education and so on) in Western society are so brutally bigoted that they must be destroyed or re-made. These extraordinary, comprehensively hopeless claims easily invite extremism, and as the fervor boils over, it becomes difficult to “distinguish between rumors and realities.” And given the urgent implications of living in a sexist, racist, fascist society, “no one is interested in this distinction” (10).
Campbell and Manning argue that victim cultures produce “crybullies” who find ever-more subtle ways to become offended and morally outraged. The more seemingly innocuous the behavior, the more important it is for crybullies to be offended by it—being offended by extremely minor behaviors or words demonstrates how “educated,” “insightful,” or “woke” one is to hetero-sexist patriarchal white supremacy. The more easily offended a person can get, the more knowledgeable they must be about oppression and bigotry. And if a member of a victim culture is not the one who found offense at something but instead simply wants to foment outrage, they can engage in what Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call “vindictive protectiveness.”4
Vindictive protectiveness involves supporting the complainant (no “evidence” needed because it is axiomatic that the West is brutally oppressive) with encouragement and resources, while attempting to take the job or tarnish the reputation of the accused person. If the accused is disgraced, their reputation destroyed, and their job lost, the offended person has won a great victory against Western oppression. Of course, this vindictive protectiveness and competitive victimhood quickly turns into a “purity spiral” where members of victim cultures accuse one another of being racist, sexist, transphobic bigots in order to appear even more victimized or vulnerable and therefore more deserving of support and resources than their peers.
Following Jonathan Haidt’s work on the topic, Campbell and Manning point out that victim cultures may produce higher rates of mental illness by encouraging members to magnify negative interpretations of social encounters, assume sinister intent in others, and by labeling entire groups of people such as whites or males as white supremacist or toxically masculine. Victim cultures confer status based on how hostile, paranoid, and cynical members are capable of being. In this way, victim cultures might initiate mental illness symptomology, or exacerbate underlying depressive and anxiety disorders.5
Victim Culture’s Future
Campbell and Manning find that victim culture is relatively less common among poor women and minorities; indeed, the most prominent bastions of victim culture are elite university campuses such as Oberlin, Brown, Yale, Claremont McKenna, or Occidental College. They note that, for example, the median family income at Middlebury College, where student protestors recently shut down a speaker they deemed a racist, sexist, anti-gay fascist, is $240,000, almost five times as much as the average US family. On this account, middle and upper-middle class women and minorities, with their own aspirations to elite positions, might be using claims of victimization to garner legal/bureaucratic support and resources in an attempt to secure a valuable advantage over the wealthy white males they see as dominating positions of power.
Much victim culture, as a result, is not so much a critique of oppression and bigotry as it is a critique of white men and a valorization of those who are not white men. In support of such a contention, Campbell and Manning cite instances of victim culture members insisting that only whites can be racist (minorities can never be racist because they are not in power), only men can be sexist (women can’t be sexist, as their existence is a constant struggle for survival against male violence and exploitation), and that the oppressed cannot act unlawfully (because the oppressed are merely seeking protection and safety). Campbell and Manning provide a mountain of interesting examples, such as the UC Berkeley assistant professor of education who argued that whiteness is intrinsically violent, or the Oklahoma high school teacher who said that “To be white is to be racist, period” (90).
These kinds of direct attacks on whites, males, and anyone else deemed privileged or powerful spark a process that Campbell and Manning refer to as “opposition leading to imitation.” Attacking whites or males for the sin of being white or male produces a backlash of identity politics whereby white nationalists and truly misogynistic groups join forces in combating perceived threats to their identity. As a consequence, people on the political Right begin mimicking the victim culture of their adversaries, claiming that being white or male is now a victimized identity in need of rallied support.
Once whites, males, and anyone else perceived to have power comes to see themselves as being victimized by social justice warriors they become motivated to investigate the veracity of victim culture ideology. The fact that, for example, people categorized as “Asian” in the US Census actually have higher per capita incomes than Whites, undermines the notion that whites uniformly benefit from a “white privilege” rooted in the oppression of minorities. When victim culture’s narrative of suffering becomes so ideological that it begins to reveal itself as inaccurate, more reasonable and legitimate claims of discrimination and inequality might be doubted or ignored. In this way, victim culture can become so enamored with its own suffering that its clearly gratuitous demonization of groups perceived as powerful leads normal people to be unduly skeptical of actual, legitimate claims of inequality and abuses of power.
Consequently, Campbell and Manning do not have a terribly optimistic view of the future. They remark that, “the vilification of whites and males might lead to greater support for those who champion the superiority of these groups,” and that “it is likely that the influence of white identity politics is beginning to grow and will continue to gain in popularity as victimhood expands” (159). And, expand it will. Due to victim culture being more common at prestigious private and Ivy League universities, students indoctrinated into victim cultures are likely to join and shape the occupations they eventually enter, including influential jobs in media, medicine, law, and politics. Also, in a very incisive point, Campbell and Manning note that upwardly mobile young parents who want their children to go to good universities might feel pressured to adopt the values of victim culture. Such widespread adoption of victim culture by parents hoping to assimilate their children into the middle class would further the culture’s general spread among the population.
An Important Work at an Important Time
Campbell and Manning understand that their efforts to analyze victim culture will be critiqued by members of victim cultures as racist, sexist, transphobic, and so on. They say that, while this would otherwise deter them from wading into this area of research, such accusations are actually a standard, expected reaction from members of victim cultures. Understanding this, Campbell and Manning trudge forward and continue exploring the phenomenon, fully aware that regardless of their conclusions, many will treat the very attempt at inquiry as racist, sexist, and all the rest.
Campbell and Manning are only interested in providing an honest and careful sociological account of a newly emerging moral culture. Though the book may at times seem polemical, the reality is that the subject matter is itself polemical, and Campbell and Manning do a good job of stating their scientific intent. In the first chapter, for example, they insist that their analysis, “does not imply that any particular victim sought out or enjoys whatever status victimhood conveys. It does not imply that this status outweighs other disadvantages they might have. And it does not imply that anyone’s grievances are illegitimate or that those who point out their marginality are being dishonest” (24).
This book is an important addition to the sociology of morality in its documentation of the contours of a newly emerging moral culture. It is worth considering, though, whether this “victim culture” is really something new, or if it is simply the result of a new generation adopting the vexatious litigation common of Americans for at least the last 40 years. People seem to sue, or threaten to sue, everyone for everything and this behavior is very similar to the tendencies Campbell and Manning find in victim culture. Victim culture might really be just a variant of honor culture that emerges in a relatively materially comfortable, strong-state social system.
Lastly, while victim culture’s insistence on the presence of constant horrific abuses of power is over-drawn and clearly strategically exaggerated, it may still be a unique historical case of a culture ostensibly motivated to reduce abuse and inequality. By Campbell’s and Manning’s own admission, neither honor cultures nor dignity cultures are so concerned with equality and fairness. On a Nietzschean account, this empathic orientation is a result of the far Left’s increasingly secular interpretation of Christianity’s obsession with a tortured messiah. Christianity was, for Nietzsche, a “slave morality,” which regarded suffering and weakness as virtuous—such a view is typified in the Christian aphorism that the meek shall inherit the earth. Through this lens, victim culture is a secularizing strain of Christianity. This line of analysis is noticeably absent from Campbell’s and Manning’s work, though this omission is small given the otherwise careful nuance of the book.
About the Author
Kevin McCaffree is assistant professor of sociology at Indiana-Purdue University (Ft. Wayne), where he teaches criminology and sociology of religion. His theoretical and empirical work has appeared in a diverse array of academic outlets including Journal of Drug and Alcohol Review, Handbook of Contemporary Sociological Theory, and Religion, Brain and Behavior. He is currently co-editor with Jonathan H. Turner of Evolutionary Analysis in the Social Sciences.
References
- Pinker, Steven. 2011. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking; Black, Donald. 2011. Moral Time. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Schwyzer, Hugo. 2006. “‘Narratives of Suffering Overcome’: Admissions Essays and a Lamentable Trend.” History News Network, November 27.
- Ginsberg, Benjamin. 2011. The Fall of the Faculty. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Lukianoff, George, and Jonathan Haidt. 2015. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” The Atlantic, 316 (2), 42–52.
- Lilienfeld, Scott O. 2017. “Microaggressions: Strong Claims, Inadequate Evidence.” Perspectives on psychological science, 12(1), 138-169 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
4)
Seventy years ago this month, the same
McDonald arrived in Tel Aviv as the first
US envoy to the newborn State of Israel
that had arisen from the ashes of the
Shoah.
By SHULI ESHEL
At a conference in France eighty years ago this month, US diplomat James G. McDonald watched in frustration as representatives of governments from around the world essentially decided to do nothing to help Europe’s Jews on the eve of the Holocaust.
Seventy years ago this month, the same McDonald arrived in Tel Aviv as the first US envoy to the newborn State of Israel that had arisen from the ashes of the Shoah. The two anniversaries serve as fitting bookends to the most consequential decade in modern Jewish history.
McDonald, a Catholic from the Midwest, was a foreign policy scholar and journalist with no particular interest in Jewish affairs. That all changed when McDonald secured an interview with new chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler in 1933.
McDonald was the first American to hear Hitler explicitly vow to destroy the Jews.
In the years to follow, McDonald devoted himself to the cause of Europe’s Jewish refugees. In 1933, he was appointed as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany. But he resigned just two years later over the refusal of the international community to open its doors to Jewish refugees.
One of the sources of his frustration was president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he asked for a US contribution of $10,000 to support the commission’s work. It was a small token sum that McDonald hoped would encourage other countries to contribute. FDR promised to give the funds, but never came through with them.
The brutal persecution of Jews in Austria following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 led to an outpouring of calls from Congress and journalists for US intervention. In response, President Roosevelt invited thirty-three countries to send delegates to a conference in Evian, France, to discuss the refugee crisis. McDonald was appointed as a member of the American delegation.
FDR made it clear even before the conference opened that “no nation would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation,” and that the US was not ready to take any special steps, either. “We knew that inevitably Evian would create bitter disappointment,” McDonald remarked soon after the conference.
And so it did. Delegate after delegate declared that their countries would not admit more Jews.
The Australian representative announced that “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.”
Golda Meir, who attended Evian as an observer, said afterwards that “nothing was accomplished at Evian except phraseology... There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy any more.”
Beginning in the spring of 1938, McDonald also served as chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. FDR told McDonald he would consider seeking a $150 million Congressional appropriation to resettle Jewish refugees.
Once again, Roosevelt broke his promise; he never requested those funds.
Although the president usually ignored the committee’s advice, and the administration’s severe immigration policy made their work extremely difficult, McDonald and his colleagues helped bring over 2,000 Jewish refugees to safety in the United States during those years.
Oddly, McDonald’s heroic efforts are not mentioned at all in the new exhibit on “Americans and the Holocaust” that recently opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. The curators say there wasn’t enough room in the 5,400-square foot exhibit to mention McDonald.
That’s hard to believe.
Many people suspect – with justification, I think – that the real reason the Museum curators omitted McDonald is because his story reflects poorly on President Roosevelt’s record. A major theme of the exhibit is that FDR did his best to help the Jews, but not much could be done. McDonald’s diaries prove otherwise. They were donated to the US Holocaust Museum by his daughters and published in four volumes from 2007 to 2017. Maybe the curators should have consulted the diaries when they were preparing the exhibit.
McDonald arrived in Tel Aviv in July 1948, as the first US government representative to the new Jewish State. At crucial stages during the War of Independence, he intervened with president Harry Truman to avert sanctions that the State Department wanted to impose because Israel refused to surrender the Negev.
In February 1949, President Truman appointed James McDonald the first United States Ambassador to Israel.
After his years of bitter experience trying to stand up against the world’s abandonment of the Jews, McDonald keenly understood the need for the Jewish state to have a defensible southern border, so that the fate of the Jewish people would never again be subject to the mercies of the international community. This month’s anniversaries of the Evian conference and McDonald’s service in Israel offer poignant reminders of that powerful historical lesson.
The writer is an Israeli-American filmmaker who has produced and directed critically acclaimed documentaries about Jewish women in sports, Israeli-Palestinian women peacemaking efforts, and the Holocaust.
Seventy years ago this month, the same McDonald arrived in Tel Aviv as the first US envoy to the newborn State of Israel that had arisen from the ashes of the Shoah. The two anniversaries serve as fitting bookends to the most consequential decade in modern Jewish history.
McDonald, a Catholic from the Midwest, was a foreign policy scholar and journalist with no particular interest in Jewish affairs. That all changed when McDonald secured an interview with new chancellor of Germany, Adolf Hitler in 1933.
McDonald was the first American to hear Hitler explicitly vow to destroy the Jews.
In the years to follow, McDonald devoted himself to the cause of Europe’s Jewish refugees. In 1933, he was appointed as the League of Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Coming from Germany. But he resigned just two years later over the refusal of the international community to open its doors to Jewish refugees.
One of the sources of his frustration was president Franklin D. Roosevelt, whom he asked for a US contribution of $10,000 to support the commission’s work. It was a small token sum that McDonald hoped would encourage other countries to contribute. FDR promised to give the funds, but never came through with them.
The brutal persecution of Jews in Austria following the German annexation of Austria in March 1938 led to an outpouring of calls from Congress and journalists for US intervention. In response, President Roosevelt invited thirty-three countries to send delegates to a conference in Evian, France, to discuss the refugee crisis. McDonald was appointed as a member of the American delegation.
FDR made it clear even before the conference opened that “no nation would be expected or asked to receive a greater number of emigrants than is permitted by its existing legislation,” and that the US was not ready to take any special steps, either. “We knew that inevitably Evian would create bitter disappointment,” McDonald remarked soon after the conference.
And so it did. Delegate after delegate declared that their countries would not admit more Jews.
The Australian representative announced that “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.”
Golda Meir, who attended Evian as an observer, said afterwards that “nothing was accomplished at Evian except phraseology... There is only one thing I hope to see before I die, and that is that my people should not need expressions of sympathy any more.”
Beginning in the spring of 1938, McDonald also served as chairman of the President’s Advisory Committee on Political Refugees. FDR told McDonald he would consider seeking a $150 million Congressional appropriation to resettle Jewish refugees.
Once again, Roosevelt broke his promise; he never requested those funds.
Although the president usually ignored the committee’s advice, and the administration’s severe immigration policy made their work extremely difficult, McDonald and his colleagues helped bring over 2,000 Jewish refugees to safety in the United States during those years.
Oddly, McDonald’s heroic efforts are not mentioned at all in the new exhibit on “Americans and the Holocaust” that recently opened at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington, D.C. The curators say there wasn’t enough room in the 5,400-square foot exhibit to mention McDonald.
That’s hard to believe.
Many people suspect – with justification, I think – that the real reason the Museum curators omitted McDonald is because his story reflects poorly on President Roosevelt’s record. A major theme of the exhibit is that FDR did his best to help the Jews, but not much could be done. McDonald’s diaries prove otherwise. They were donated to the US Holocaust Museum by his daughters and published in four volumes from 2007 to 2017. Maybe the curators should have consulted the diaries when they were preparing the exhibit.
McDonald arrived in Tel Aviv in July 1948, as the first US government representative to the new Jewish State. At crucial stages during the War of Independence, he intervened with president Harry Truman to avert sanctions that the State Department wanted to impose because Israel refused to surrender the Negev.
In February 1949, President Truman appointed James McDonald the first United States Ambassador to Israel.
After his years of bitter experience trying to stand up against the world’s abandonment of the Jews, McDonald keenly understood the need for the Jewish state to have a defensible southern border, so that the fate of the Jewish people would never again be subject to the mercies of the international community. This month’s anniversaries of the Evian conference and McDonald’s service in Israel offer poignant reminders of that powerful historical lesson.
The writer is an Israeli-American filmmaker who has produced and directed critically acclaimed documentaries about Jewish women in sports, Israeli-Palestinian women peacemaking efforts, and the Holocaust.
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