Christianity – is dead! Jesus and Paul were extremely Anti-Semitic. They argued with Legalists and the Judaizers, declaring the Laws of Moses is not applicable to the mission of their new religion. You can not blame Nazi Germany for the ongoing trouble with Zionists. You can blame Evangelical Republicans for making the Zionist Crisis – America’s Political Crisis! Israel has exploited the latest schism to hit the West in regards to the fairytales of Tim LaHaye that Ginni Thomas promotes. How about the new Speaker of the House?
Millions of people all over the world are demanding leniency for the innocent people of Gaza. It is not going to happen. Our media tools will be filled with the horrific images of Israel exacting revenge. The internet was destroyed in Gaza. Billions of World Citizens – are plunged into The Past – to the very day I was born. On that day – thousands of comets appeared in the sk!. There is talk of America being dragged into the Zionist Angst in Syria!
Millions of Evangelicals Voters for Trump -are thrilled to death with the growing Chaos and Gore, because they believe this is a sign Jesus is coming back – as soon as the Secular Government is destroyed, will His Kingdom come. On Facebook there are posts filed with “Amen”. I AM THE LAST candidate! Anybody – but me! Who else – cares as much? Who else has compiled such relative history?
“It’s a story that ends with the Jews being subsumed into non-existence, and that’s after it’s demonstrated that their entire purpose was to bring about the return of another religion’s messiah in the first place. But horror is an insufficient response to LaHaye’s work, which was an apparent source of inspiration to millions of productive, law-abiding, utterly normal, and outwardly tolerant Americans.”
Below is a painting I did in 1962 of our appartment on Midvale in WLA. I was sixteen when I id this End of World prediction. I am calling on a White Paper to find out what Orthodoxic Jews – really think of Jesus! Do they believe – he has a right to exist? Do they believe LBBTQ People have a right to exist? How about Hippies and the Peace Movement? What about North Vietnam? Did Israel send any troops to fight alongside Americans Soldiers in the Vietnam War? We know Hamas attacked and murdered participants in the Peaceful Supernova Music Festival. Israel has yet to condemn Russia for going after LGBTQ people of Ukraine in a religious crusade. Putin is bombing and murdering little children. Is he against Abortion Rights? Theses are all good Moral Questions – and not demonstrations of Anti-Semitism.. They say Hamas used civilians as a shield. Israel uses Anti-Semitism to ward off good questions – from good people!.
John ‘The Nazarite Seer’
“The Jews, I find are very, very selfish,” Truman wrote on July 21. “They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire.”
October 4, 1946 (Friday)[edit]
- On the eve of the Jewish Yom Kippur holiday, and a month before midterm elections, U.S. President Harry S. Truman announced that he had cabled British Prime Minister Clement Attlee to say that he endorsed immediate immigration of over 100,000 Jewish refugees into Palestine. Truman’s rationale was that the British-mediated conference between Arabs and Jews had been adjourned until December, and that “In view of the fact that winter will come before the conference can be resumed, I believe and urge that substantial immigration into Palestine cannot await a solution.”[9] Attlee was furious at Truman’s sudden public statement, and forecast that it would only increase violence in the region, while leaders of Arab nations felt that they had been betrayed, and Truman’s opponents criticized the decision as a clumsy bid for Jewish voters.[10] “It may well have been Truman’s desperate political straits that led him to such a blatantly political gambit,” observed one later historian.[11]
- https://www.space.com/greatest-meteor-storms-in-history
- OCTOBER 9, 1946: COSMIC FIREWORKS
- Unlike in 1933, astronomers were ready for the Draconids in 1946. Comet Giacobini-Zinner was back and both it and the Earth seemed correctly positioned for a replay. Despite a full moon, skywatchers were not disappointed.
- One correspondent for Sky & Telescope magazine wrote: “Three of us tried to keep count (of the meteors), but after tallying 500 ceased enumeration. There was no quarter of the heavens that was untouched by the fireworks.” From Chicago, another observer said that the brightest meteors outshone Venus at her best, and showed colors of red, orange, and green and could even be followed when their paths led behind wisps of clouds.
- Hourly rates varied widely from as low as 3,000 to as high as 10,000.
Truman weighs role of Jews in Palestine: Nov. 13, 1945
President Harry S. Truman (left) shakes hands with British Prime Minister Clement Attlee on the steps of the White House on Nov. 10, 1945, as Secretary of State James Byrnes looks on. | AP Photo
By ANDREW GLASS
11/12/2016 10:57 PM EST
On this day in 1945, President Harry S. Truman announced the creation of an Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to examine the possibility of resettling tens of thousands of displaced European Jews in Palestine.
In the last weeks of World War II, the Allies liberated many death camps where the Nazis had slaughtered millions of Jews. Many survivors in the formerly Nazi-occupied territories emerged from the Holocaust without families, homes, jobs or funds.
In August, Truman had received a report from Earl Harrison that sharply criticized the U.S. Army for its harsh treatment of Jewish survivors. Harrison, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, found that Jews were being kept under armed guard in former concentration camps. His report prompted the War Department to order Army Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower to improve conditions in the displayed persons’ camps.
In April 1946, the joint committee of inquiry recommended that 100,000 Jewish refugees be permitted to immigrate to Palestine. Truman wrote to British Prime Minister Clement Attlee — Britain still controlled Palestine under a post-World War I mandate — asking for help in moving the repatriation process forward.
The president’s military advisers, however, warned against going forward, arguing that communists, as many Zionists were believed to be, in a new Jewish state could jeopardize the West’s access to Middle Eastern oil. For a time, the advisers’ views prevailed with the president.
Truman and Attlee then set up another bilateral group, the Morrison-Grady team. In July 1946, this team worked out a compromise accepted by both London and Washington. Truman, however, rejected the proposed deal — as did Zionists, who spurned the small amount of land to be allotted to them.
Truman initially opposed the creation of a Jewish state. Instead, he tried to promote an Arab-Jewish federation or binational state. He finally gave up in 1947 and endorsed the partition of Palestine into separate states, but he continued to express regret in private that he had not achieved his original objective, which he blamed most often on the “unwarranted interference” of American Zionists.
The issue continued to be debated in Washington and at the United Nations for another two years until the British withdrew. Truman, against the advice of his key subordinates, recognized the new state of Israel on May 14, 1948.
After he had recognized the new state, he pressed the Israeli government to negotiate with the Arabs over borders and refugees; and expressed his disgust with “the manner in which the Jews are handling the refugee problem.” The invasion of Palestine by bordering Arab nations in a failed effort to drive out the Jews negated any possibility of such negotiations.
https://www.politico.com/story/2016/11/truman-weighs-role-of-jews-in-palestine-nov-13-1945-231124
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/10/17/us-israel-biden-truman-history/
‘I Am Cyrus’
Jewish Commentary
During World War I, Lieutenant Harry Truman was assigned to run the regimental canteen at an Army training camp in Oklahoma. To make it a financial success, Harry took on a partner, Sergeant Edward Jacobson. For Truman, his biographer David McCullough notes, Jacobson’s Jewishness was a plus. “I have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson and he is a crackerjack,” he wrote his wife Bess. After six months, business was extraordinarily successful, and some of the other officers began teasing Harry, referring to him as a “lucky Jew” and “Trumanheimer.” McCullough reports that to this Truman replied: “I guess I should be very proud of my Jewish ability.” After the war, Truman and Jacobson went into the haberdashery business together. It failed, but they remained lifelong friends.
Three decades later, Truman was entering the third year of his unexpected presidency. The United Nations had approved the partition of Palestine into independent states, but the American delegation, under the direction of Secretary of State George Marshall, sought to revert back to a UN trusteeship for the region. Truman revered Marshall more than any other man alive and, feeling that many Zionist leaders had been disrespectful to him, refused to meet with any Jewish representatives. That included Chaim Weizmann, the great scientist and leading international figurehead of the cause of Jewish statehood. Eddie Jacobson, the only Jew with walk-in privileges to the White House, was asked to plead on Weizmann’s behalf. He was allowed entry to the Oval Office on the express condition that he not bring up Palestine.
Jacobson, of course, immediately brought up Palestine. Truman, Mccullough recounts, complained bitterly of the abuse he had experienced, of how “disrespectful and mean” certain Jewish leaders had been to him. Jacobson, in return, sadly reflected that “my dear friend, the President of the United States, was at that moment as close to being an anti-Semite as a man could possibly be.” Then, pointing to Truman’s statuette of Andrew Jackson, Jacobson took a different tack:
“Harry, all your life you have had a hero…I too have a hero, a man I never met, but who is, I think, the greatest Jew who ever lived.…I am talking about Chaim Weizmann.…He traveled thousands of miles just to see you and plead the cause of my people. Now you refuse to see him just because you are insulted by some of our American Jewish leaders, even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with these insults and would be the last man to be party to them. It doesn’t sound like you, Harry, because I thought you could take this stuff they have been handing out.”
As Abba Eban later wrote, the comparison between Weizmann and Andrew Jackson was unimaginably far-fetched. And it worked. Truman began drumming his fingers on the desk. He wheeled around in his chair and with his back to Jacobson sat looking out the window into the garden. For what to Jacobson seemed “like centuries,” neither of them said anything. Then, swinging about and looking Jacobson in the eye, Truman said what Jacobson later described as the most endearing words he had ever heard: “You win, you baldheaded son-of-a-bitch. I will see him.”
Weizmann was secretly ushered into the White House, and support for partition was sustained. On May 14, Truman overrode Marshall in recognizing the Jewish state.
Later that month, Weizmann, now the president of Israel, returned to Washington and gave Truman a small Torah scroll. Truman took it and said, “Thanks: I’ve always wanted one of these!” Upon retiring from the presidency, Truman spoke to a Jewish audience in New York, and was introduced by Eddie Jacobson as the man who helped bring the state of Israel into existence. “What do you mean, helped?” Truman interjected. “I am Cyrus! I am Cyrus!”
The friendship of Truman and Jacobson is often cited as one of the many miraculous details in the story of Israel’s birth, as indeed it is. Yet often overlooked is the significance of Truman’s seemingly casual ejaculation to Jacobson: I am Cyrus. Cyrus was the Persian emperor who allowed Ezra and the Judean exiles in Babylon to return to the Holy Land and begin to build anew after the destruction of the first Temple. But he is more than that; he is the most celebrated non-Jew in the Hebrew Bible. Consider this: Cyrus is the only non-Jew accorded the appellation Messiah, or God’s anointed, by the prophets, reflecting the providential role in history that he has been chosen to play:
Thus said the LORD to Cyrus, His anointed one— Whose right hand He has grasped, Treading down nations before him, Ungirding the loins of kings, Opening doors before him And letting no gate stay shut: I will march before you And level the hills that loom up; I will shatter doors of bronze And cut down iron bars. I will give you treasures concealed in the dark And secret hoards— So that you may know that it is I the LORD, The God of Israel, who call you by name. For the sake of My servant Jacob, Israel My chosen one, I call you by name.
Cyrus is even given the last word in all of Hebrew scripture. The book of Chronicles concludes:
And in the first year of King Cyrus of Persia, when the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah was fulfilled, the LORD roused the spirit of King Cyrus of Persia to issue a proclamation throughout his realm by word of mouth and in writing, as follows: “Thus said King Cyrus of Persia: The LORD God of Heaven has given me all the kingdoms of the earth, and has charged me with building Him a House in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Any one of you of all His people, the LORD his God be with him and let him go up.”
Thus the most sacred text of the Jewish faith ends with the words of a non-Jew urging the return to the Land of Israel. Truman likening himself to the ancient king of Persia should inspire us to reflect on the what role the Bible in general, and Cyrus in particular, played in this story. Rightly understood, it tells us a great deal about Truman, about America, and Jewish history itself.
First: While Jacobson’s friendship indeed played a role in American support for the birth of Israel, the source of Truman’s truest motivations lie in what he said sincerely about the Torah scroll he received—“I always wanted one of these!”—and the three small words that he uttered to his old friend Eddie: “I am Cyrus.”
Truman’s aide Clark Clifford noted that “his own reading of ancient history and the Bible made him a supporter of the idea of a Jewish homeland in Palestine, even when others who were sympathetic to the plight of the Jews were talking of sending them to places like Brazil.” Truman, then, reflects an American penchant as old as the republic itself: seeing the stories of the Hebrew Bible replayed in the story of the United States. Benjamin Franklin’s proposal for the seal was Israel at the splitting of the sea, and George Washington’s 1790 letter to the Jews of Savannah makes the theological connection between the Bible and America explicit:
May the same wonder-working Deity, who long since delivering the Hebrews from their Egyptian Oppressors planted them in the promised land—whose providential agency has lately been conspicuous in establishing these United States as an independent nation—still continue to water them with the dews of Heaven and to make the inhabitants of every denomination participate in the temporal and spiritual blessings of that people whose God is Jehovah.
We welcome you, Washington says, not only as Americans, but as Jews; and we see reflections of your story in our story. Several years later, the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow visited Newport, Rhode Island, and stood in the cemetery that held the graves of the Jews Washington once visited. There he pondered the Sephardic names he saw and reflected on the resilience of the Jewish people. The source of their endurance, he argues, was their connection of the biblical past to their people’s future:
For in the background figures vague and vast
Of patriarchs and of prophets rose sublime,
And all the great traditions of the Past
They saw reflected in the coming time.
Longfellow poetically describes what history means for Jews but captures as well how American statesmen and citizens saw the Bible reflected in their own age.
The American affinity for Israel must be understood in this way, beautifully expressed by George W. Bush, speaking in the Knesset on Israel’s 60th anniversary. Bush spoke of Truman and then immediately added:
The alliance between our governments is unbreakable, yet the source of our friendship runs deeper than any treaty. It is grounded in the shared spirit of our people, the bonds of the Book, the ties of the soul. When William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower in 1620, he quoted the words of Jeremiah: “Come let us declare in Zion the word of God.” The founders of my country saw a new promised land and bestowed upon their towns names like Bethlehem and New Canaan. And in time, many Americans became passionate advocates for a Jewish state.
With this in mind, let us return to Truman’s phrase “I am Cyrus.” By saying this, Truman was likening America not to biblical Israel but to ancient Persia; and unlike Franklin or Washington, he was drawing inspiration not from Moses, but from Cyrus. Fascinatingly, in an interview about Israel later in life with Merle Miller, Truman made mention of Persia in describing his love for the Bible:
It wasn’t just the Biblical part about Palestine that interested me. The whole history of that area of the world is just about the most complicated and most interesting of any area anywhere, and I have always made a very careful study of it. There has always been trouble there, always been wars from the time of Darius the Great and Rameses on, and the pity of it is that the whole area is just waiting to be developed….What has happened is only the beginning of what could happen, because potentially that is the richest area in the world.
Let us put ourselves in Truman’s place. He had seen America in a few years go from an isolated nation across the Atlantic to the most supreme power on earth. In his own presidency, he had dropped an atomic bomb on Japan, reorganized Europe under the Marshall Plan, and stood as the bulwark for the free world against the Soviets. America had begun as a story akin to biblical Israel: a tiny nation, unimportant in the eyes of most of civilization. That is not, under his presidency, what America became.
If, for America, the Hebrew Bible’s story is replayed in various ways in American history, then it needed a different model in Truman’s time; not of a small nation but of a superpower, but still biblically inspired, still playing a role in God’s providential plan. What better model was there for America than the one played by the man who is given the last word in Hebrew scripture?
Truman’s reference, then, was deliberate; and to religious Jews who see both the stories of Israel and America as profoundly providential tales, the Hebrew Bible’s concluding with a non-Jew proclaiming the Jewish return to Zion may be a sign of things to come.
Today, the American affinity for the story of the Hebrew Bible, woven into the political DNA of the United States, is still present—reflected first and foremost in the phenomenon of Christian Zionism. Cyrus’s story hints at an extraordinary occurrence unparalleled in Jewish history: the existence of millions of Gentiles who are Zionists, Americans whose attachment to Hebraic texts is the foundation of their love for the Jewish state.
Yet the very same verse that brings the Bible to a close also implicitly contains a warning. The American founders, and many of their successors, were dramatically affected by the Tanakh, but there is no guarantee that America will remain this way. Here Cyrus’s story offers a cautionary example.
The Book of Ezra reports that though Cyrus proclaimed the Jewish return, the rebuilding of the Temple was then halted by those who bribed members of Cyrus’s court and lied about the Jews’ motivations. This was the first movement against the Jewish right to Jerusalem, and it existed in Cyrus’s empire, 2,500 years ago. The message is clear for our time: A world power that is moved by the story of biblical Israel can also become unmoored from the values of biblical Israel. The Cyrus whose words close out the Tanakh is, perhaps, a hint to a future where millions of Gentiles would revere the Hebrew bible and the land of Israel; but it can also be seen as a reminder that countries whose leaders were once inspired by the word of God can cease to be so.
In the America of today, where so many remain bound to the Bible, and so many have forgotten it completely, there is much to celebrate and much cause for concern. Here, too, the story of Truman and the Bible speaks to us. The photograph of Weizmann presenting a Torah to Truman is famous, but the larger story of the scroll is mostly unknown.
When Weizmann arrived in America, he had asked Dr. Louis Finkelstein, the chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and therefore the overseer of New York’s Jewish Museum, if he could select a menorah from the collection to give the president as a gift. Finkelstein told him that the menorahs were all bequests and were therefore unavailable; he gave a small family Torah to Weizmann instead. This was, apparently, inspired by a biblical exhortation for a Jewish monarch to carry a Torah scroll with him at all times.
After Truman left the presidency, Dr. Finkelstein decided he would like to have the scroll on display at the Jewish Museum. As described by the seminary’s former president, Bernard Mandelbaum, Finkelstein told Truman of the multitudes of visitors who would see the Torah on Fifth Avenue. Truman responded that in his library in Independence, Missouri, he anticipated even more visitors. Finkelstein then tried another tack. “You know, Mr. President,” he reported, “a scroll is written on parchment, and if you don’t roll it from time to time, it can deteriorate.” Truman, Mandelbaum reports, pointed his finger at Finkelstein and exclaimed: “Dr. Finkelstein, you are not getting it back!”
Strikingly, on the website of the Truman Library today, one will see pictures of a rabbi visiting Truman’s library with the express purpose of scrolling the Torah, with Truman selecting the particular passage. We see as well, in another photograph, Truman with the rabbi, each grasping the Torah’s handles, holding the Torah aloft together.
For those who see history through the lens of the Bible, there is a profound symbolism to this. We Jews, throughout the year, scroll through the Torah and read it in its entirety. Each story in it is precious, each part has significance; and throughout American history, different portions of the Hebrew Bible have served as a polestar to the United States. At times it is the tale of the Exodus that spoke to America, as it did to the Founders; at times it is that of Ezra and Cyrus that will suddenly inspire, as it did for Truman. All this is for the good, as long as America, like Truman in those pictures, continues to hold on to the Torah, and allows it to form its worldview.
The question we face is whether the Hebrew Bible will continue to speak to America, or whether, as in suddenly secular Europe, it will amputate that aspect of its identity entirely from itself.
Before the U.S. recognized Israel, a president’s friend pushed the cause
October 17, 2023 at 12:53 p.m. EDT
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Eddie Jacobson had never before asked for a favor from his close friend, President Harry S. Truman. But during a meeting in the Oval Office on the morning of March 13, 1948, Jacobson made an urgent plea: He called on the U.S. president to meet with Chaim Weizmann, the former head of the World Zionist Organization and the movement’s spiritual leader, to recognize the first Jewish state in nearly 2,000 years.
“You must see Dr. Weizmann,” Jacobson said to Truman, according to “First Friends: The Powerful, Unsung (And Unelected) People Who Shaped Our Presidents,” a 2021 book written by Gary Ginsberg. “You must support an independent Jewish state.”
The suggestion annoyed and angered Truman, who, historians say, had been known to disparage Jews with antisemitic slurs in private, and the president even swiveled his chair to turn his back on Jacobson. Then, Jacobson, an Army buddy and former business partner of Truman’s who had come to the White House unscheduled, found a small statue of Andrew Jackson on horseback and made a desperate appeal to his friend.
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“Harry, you have a hero, Andrew Jackson. I, too, have a hero, Chaim Weizmann,” Jacobson said, according to Clifton Truman Daniel, Truman’s eldest grandson, in a post for the Truman Library Institute. “He’s the greatest Jew who ever lived. He’s an old and sick man and he’s traveled all this way to speak to you and you won’t see him. That’s not like you.”
Truman drummed his fingers on the desk and turned around in his chair. The president had changed his mind.
“All right, you baldheaded son of a bitch,” he said to Jacobson. “You win. I’ll see Weizmann.”
The agreement led to a secret meeting between Truman and Weizmann days later in which the president promised to continue to work on behalf of the establishment of Israel. Then, 11 minutes after Israel declared its independence, Truman made good on his friend’s request: “The United States recognizes the provisional government as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel,” Truman wrote.
The note signed by Truman on May 14, 1948, which was met with pushback by his own State Department, marked the start of a relationship between the United States and Israel that has lasted more than 75 years, with president after president reiterating U.S. support of the Jewish state. And it all began with a favor.
“Jacobson did untold service in setting up the Israeli government,” Truman said at a chapel dedication in 1959, according to the Columbian Missourian. “He was a man after my own heart.”
Several Western leaders announced plans to travel to Israel this week in a show of support for the country ahead of an expected Israeli ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, and to plead for humanitarian relief for Gaza. Among them is President Biden, who said he would visit Israel on Wednesday to show solidarity with the U.S. ally “in the face of Hamas’s brutal terrorist attack” that killed more than 1,400 Israelis. Biden also will visit Jordan, where he plans to meet with Jordanian King Abdullah II, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, which has endured Israeli airstrikes that have killed more than 2,700 Palestinians.
Biden to travel to Israel on Wednesday
The friendship that helped lead to U.S. recognition of Israel started in Kansas City, Mo. Jacobson was born on June 17, 1891, and was raised on New York’s Lower East Side by his parents, David and Sarah, impoverished Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, before the family moved to Kansas City.
Not long after the move, Jacobson, a 15-year-old high school dropout, was depositing the day’s receipts for a nearby dry goods store at Union National Bank when he met Truman, then a 22-year-old vault clerk, in 1906. They reconnected years later in 1917 at Oklahoma’s Fort Sill, where they trained to fight in World War I. The friends got together to run a successful canteen in camp to help raise funds for more food and supplies for their colleagues.
“I have a Jew in charge of the canteen by the name of Jacobson,” Truman wrote, according to “First Friends,” “and he is a crackerjack.”
How a U.S. president known to disparage Jews became godfather of Israel
After the war, they were inspired to go into business together again. This time, in November 1919, Truman and Jacobson decided to open a haberdashery in downtown Kansas City.
“Harry would get around a lot, you know, and was mixing with people. He never stayed in the store all day — he would get out and go to lunches and mix with people,” Ted Marks, a close friend of Truman’s, recalled in a 1962 interview with the Truman Library. “He was very well known in that way and Eddie Jacobson would stay around and take care of the business.”
But the business failed, in part because of the 1921 collapse in grain prices that hammered the Midwest economy. The postwar recession had caught up to the store, which closed in 1922.
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“Jacobson and I went to bed one night with a $35,000 inventory and awoke the next day with a $25,000 shrinkage,” Truman wrote in 1945 as part of his autobiographical manuscript, according to the Truman Library. “This brought bills payable and bank notes due at such a rapid rate we went out of business.”
Jacobson declared bankruptcy in 1925, and the debt followed him in his career as a traveling salesman. Truman also struggled to pay off the debt, but did so in 1935, which is when he was representing Missouri in the U.S. Senate.
The two kept in touch over the years, with Jacobson inviting Truman on hunting and fishing expeditions on the Missouri River. Then, leaders of Zionism, the international movement to establish in Palestine a homeland for the Jewish people, made contact with Jacobson to see whether he could persuade Truman to meet with Weizmann. Although Truman had previously gotten along well with Weizmann in previous meetings, the president had become so irritated talking about Zionism that his support of a Jewish state was waning.
Jacobson was Jewish, but not ultrareligious. He had spoken to Truman about the atrocities happening against Jews before and during the Holocaust, but the president was not initially as receptive when it came to the subject of an independent Jewish state. Jacobson had previously made an overture to Truman on the subject of a Jewish state, but the president reiterated his stance in a February 1948 letter: “The situation has been a headache to me for two and a half years. The Jews are so emotional, and the Arabs are so difficult to talk with that it is almost impossible to get anything done.”
Still, Jacobson agreed to try again and called Truman on the morning of March 13, 1948, from a Washington hotel to see whether his friend had a few minutes to see him that day.
When Jacobson asked Truman to meet with Weizmann and consider recognizing Israel, the president snapped, saying how “disrespectful and mean” certain Jews had been to him, according to Ginsberg. Jacobson wept in making his case for Truman to meet with Weizmann, according to “Plain Speaking,” the 1973 biography of Truman by Merle Miller.
“Now you refuse to see him because you were insulted by some American Jewish leaders, even though you know that Weizmann had absolutely nothing to do with those insults, and would be the last man to be a party to them,” Jacobson said. “It does not sound like you, Harry.”
At this point, Truman relented, calling his longtime friend a “baldheaded son of a bitch.” Two months and one day later, Truman recognized Israel. Days after the president recognized Israel, Truman invited Weizmann for a public meeting at the White House.
Although some had wanted Jacobson to become president of Israel, the businessman scoffed at the notion, telling reporters in 1949 that he was “too proud of my American citizenship to trade it for any office in the world.”
Jacobson hoped to escort Truman on his first trip to Israel. But that wasn’t to be: Jacobson died of a heart attack in 1955 at the age of 64. When Truman sat shiva at Jacobson’s home in Kansas City, the former president was devastated and could barely speak. He later found the words to remember “one of the best friends I had in this world.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever known a man I thought more of, outside my own family, than I did of Eddie Jacobson,” Truman said, according to “Famous Friends.” “He was an honorable man. He’s one of the finest men that ever walked on this earth, and that’s covering a lot of territory.”
WASHINGTON —
Ever since Harry S. Truman, defying the State Department and the military, recognized the state of Israel 11 minutes after its creation in May 1948, the 33rd president has been lionized as a friend to Jews.
Chaim Weizmann, the president of Israel, visited the White House soon afterward and gave President Truman a Torah. Years later, with the former president’s blessings, Hebrew University created the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace.
So it came as something of a shock last week when the Truman Presidential Museum & Library in Independence, Mo., released a diary Truman kept in 1947, in which he complained that Jews “have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs.”
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Complaining about a call from Henry Morgenthau, the former Treasury secretary who was head of the United Jewish Appeal, Truman fumed about a request to pressure Britain, then in charge of Palestine, into admitting a boatload of Jewish refugees made homeless by World War II. Their plight was portrayed in Leon Uris’ book “The Exodus,” which was made into a movie starring Paul Newman.
“The Jews, I find are very, very selfish,” Truman wrote on July 21. “They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the underdog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire.”
Pundits seized on the quotes as evidence of prejudice. “It’s a good thing for Harry Truman that he’s dead,” opined Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, because “I would have decked him.” The Anti-Defamation League put out a statement decrying the diary entries, saying, “Sadly, President Truman was indeed a man of his times, and that much less a man because of it.” A staunch defender of Israel, William Safire, the newspaper columnist and onetime speechwriter for President Nixon, said Truman’s outburst was worse than slurs about Jews revealed in Nixon’s tapes.
But prominent historians who have made a life’s study of Truman’s character and his presidency argue that nothing in the 5,500-word diary changes their view of Truman as a champion of Israel. “The anti-Semitic comments were nothing new to historians,” said Alonzo Hamby, a Truman biographer and historian at Ohio University. “It was an outburst, rather like some other outbursts that Truman was capable of from time to time. It’s important to understand that Truman grew up in a small town and he absorbed the prevalent ethnic cliches.”
Historians point out that Truman went into the haberdashery business in 1919 with Eddie Jacobsen, whom he had met in World War I and who was Jewish. They remained lifelong friends, although Truman biographers say Jacobsen was never invited to the Wallace home, where Truman lived with his wife, Bess, and his in-laws.
At a symposium tonight at the Truman Library in Independence, Ray Geselbracht, library education coordinator, is set to ask a panel of historians whether the diary will alter how they interpret Truman’s presidency.
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“It’s hard to argue that Truman had deep-rooted antipathy toward the Jews,” Hamby said. “While he was in the Senate in the 1930s, he got involved in an investigation of the railroads. The general counsel for the committee investigation was Max Lowenthal, a public interest attorney who was Jewish and who became an unofficial advisor to Truman throughout his presidency.”
Sara Bloomfield, director of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, agreed that “Truman’s sympathy for the plight of Jews was very apparent.” She added that Truman’s comments were “typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at that time in all parts of American society. This was an acceptable way to talk.”
Coretta Scott King came to a similar conclusion in 1983, when she traveled to Independence to receive an award from the museum. According to museum archivist Dennis Bilger, King was asked about disparaging remarks Truman made, calling civil rights protesters “a bunch of darn fools” for demonstrating in Richmond. She concluded that Truman, who issued an executive order in 1948 desegregating the military, had made the remarks, but that his overall record on civil rights was good.
Historians seem to have reached similar conclusions about Truman remarks on Jews. Hamby notes that issues involving Israel’s creation and the repatriation of refugees displaced by World War II crowded Truman’s political calculus. Morgenthau, he added, was one of Truman’s least favorite officials in President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration.
Robert Ferrell, another Truman biographer and former professor at Indiana University, argues that Truman was also being buffeted by problems in Europe and the Soviet Union. He was also under pressure from various interests, including many people who worried that recognizing Israel would damage U.S. relations with Arab nations — and he was sinking in the polls going into the 1948 election.
Curators found the 1947 Truman diary this year. Written in a blue-covered book titled “1947 Diary and Manual of the Real Estate Board of New York, Inc.,” the document sat on the shelves for 38 years, until a librarian leafing through it discovered Truman’s writing behind 160 pages of ads and member lists.
The diary also contains vintage Truman candor. At one point he referred to the White House as “this great white jail,” and lamented that it was haunted by ghosts of presidents past. “Anyone with imagination can see old Jim Buchanan walking up and down worrying about conditions not of his making,” Truman wrote on Jan. 6. “They all walk up and down the halls of this place and moan about what they should have done and didn’t.”
On March 7, as he was leaving Mexico City, Truman wrote that a doctor had told him he had cardiac asthma. “Ain’t that hell,” he wrote. “Well it makes no diff[erence]. Will go on as before. I’ve sworn him to secrecy! So what!”
That seems to sum up the attitude of some historians to the new disclosures. “I don’t think it tells us much that’s new,” said Richard Kirkendall, a Truman historian who organized tonight’s conference for scholars to present papers on Truman’s Farewell Address. Looking at people in the context of the times in which they lived, he said, is “a well-established tradition in the [history] profession.”
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