First to Cry Down Injustice?

The First to Cry Down Injustice explores the range of responses from Jews in the Pacific West to the removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII. While it is often assumed that American Jewsbecause of a commitment to fighting prejudicewould have taken a position against this discriminatory policy, the treatment of Japanese Americans was largely ignored by national Jewish groups and liberal groups. For those on the West Coast, however, proximity to the evacuation made it difficult to ignore. Conflicting impulses on the issuethe desire to speak out against discrimination on the one hand, but to support a critical wartime policy on the otherled most western Jewish organizations and community newspapers to remain tensely silent. Some Jewish leaders did speak out against the policy because of personal relationships with Japanese Americans and political convictions. Yet a leading California Jewish organization made a significant contribution to propaganda in favor of mass removal. Eisenberg places these varied responses into the larger context of the western ethnic landscape and argues that they were linked to, and help to illuminate, the identity of western Jews both as westerners and as Jews.

While numerous scholars have noted that American Jews and their organizations were largely absent from the small minority which protested the disgraceful treatment of Japanese Americans during World War II, Ellen Eisenberg's carefully researched monograph is the first to examine what was said and done in the major west coast cities—Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland—which were the primary contact points between Jewish and Japanese Americans. Her rigorous analysis not only helps us understand the past, but also sheds light on some aspects of contemporary race and ethnic relations., This work will be a significant contribution to the field. It is a brilliant analysis on many different textured levels of analysis and inquiry. Within the scholarship extant already in this field, this is far and away the best research and conclusions. It is particularly good because it engages several different historiographic traditions and shows the relationship between them., This work is a reliable accounting of its subject and is easily read by those interested in the subject. It will appeal most interested in Jewish American history and secondarily to Japanese American internment. The scholarship is solid and the work worthwhile., In her carefully researched study, Ellen M. Eisenberg offers a sober and admirably balanced account of the complex considerations in the region that influenced the response of Jewish leadership to the plight of the Japanese. . . . Eisenberg has done a fine job of presenting a nuanced account of a sad chapter in American history., A remarkable, brilliantly researched and wonderfully nuanced study that for the first time fully discloses the western Jewish response to the incarceration of Japanese-Americans in World War II. Filled with blockbuster revelations concerning the silence, and even the complicity of some leading Jews and one leading Jewish organization in this most sordid of episodes, the book is nevertheless a model of fair-mindedness. A cautionary tale of how bad things can be done by good people.

Ellen Eisenberg is Dwight and Margaret Lear Professor of American History at Willamette University.