Speaking Out, Keeping Silent: Western Jews, Japanese Americans, and the Selective Fight against Prejudice, 1900–42

Although the organized Jewish communities of the West voiced a strong commitment to fighting prejudice in all of its forms, they were largely silent as their Japanese American neighbors were removed from their homes and incarcerated in 1942. This paper links that silence to earlier responses of western Jews to anti-Asian prejudice in the West by exploring the relationship between western Jews and Japanese Americans, and the place of both groups in the ethnic landscape of the American West in the decades prior to the War. Contrasting the historic acceptance of Jews in the West with hostility toward Japanese Americans as the West’s most threatening “other”, this paper explores patterns of interaction between the two communities. On the one hand, in some western cities, such as Seattle and Los Angeles, Jews and Japanese Americans shared neighborhoods and some, particularly the youth, developed personal ties. Yet the responses of organized Jewish communities to local and state discriminatory measures reveal a tendency to ignore acts against Asian Americans, despite a strong community commitment to fighting prejudice. The paper makes the case that, although western Jewish communities were increasingly articulating an agenda of fighting prejudice in this period, the strong regional antipathy toward Japanese Americans contributed to internal conflict and public silence on anti-Nikkei measures. This paper is based on my new book The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during WWII (Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).