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Hating Israel Isn’t New; How the CIA and State Department Undermined the Jewish State
“Teddy Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandson is an anti-Israel protester at Princeton,” blared a New York Post headline on May 4, 2024.
The Post reported that Quentin Colon Roosevelt, an 18-year-old freshman, and descendant of the 25th President, is an anti-Israel activist at the Ivy League university. But far from being hip and new, Quentin’s brand of anti-Zionism is old hat — he is merely continuing a long family tradition of anti-Israel activism.
There is an abundance of literature on Franklin D. Roosevelt’s views on Jews and Zionism, the belief in Jewish self-determination. Both FDR and his wife Eleanor had made antisemitic remarks. In a private conversation in 1938, then-President Roosevelt suggested that by dominating the economy in Poland, Jews were themselves fueling antisemitism. And in a 1941 Cabinet meeting, FDR remarked that there were too many Jewish Federal employees in Oregon. In his final days, FDR promised Saudi leader Abdul Aziz Ibn al Saud that he would oppose the creation of Jewish state in the Jewish people’s ancestral homeland.
FDR is the president who led the United States to victory against Adolf Hitler. He also employed Jews in high-ranking positions in his government. But he is also the president whose administration failed to save more Jews fleeing Nazism, and who refused to bomb the railway tracks leading to Auschwitz and other death camps where millions of Jews met a ghastly end. Accordingly, it makes sense that his beliefs regarding Jews have been the subject of books and belated study.
Less examined, however, is the Oyster Bay branch of the Roosevelt clan, and their beliefs regarding Zionism. In part, this is easily explained by the unique place that FDR holds in American history. He is the only president to serve four terms, and presided over both the Great Depression, World War II, and arguably the beginning of the Cold War. His branch of the family, the Hyde Park Roosevelts, were Democrats and remained active in public life for decades after his 1945 death.
At first glance, the Oyster Bay Roosevelts were more of a turn of the 19th century affair. They were Republicans, and their scion was Teddy Roosevelt, a war hero turned governor of New York state who, thanks to an assassin’s bullet, found himself as the nation’s leader in 1901.
The famously ebullient Roosevelt helped redefine the country’s idea of a president, and served as an inspiration for his cousin Franklin. But Teddy largely presided over an era of peace and tranquility, not war and upheaval.
Teddy was a philosemite. He was the first occupant of the Oval Office to appoint a Jewish American to the Cabinet. He championed the rights of Jews, both at home and abroad, and was harshly critical of the numerous pogroms that unfolded in czarist Russia.
As Seth Rogovoy has noted, Roosevelt’s “special relationship with Jews was forged during his time serving as police commissioner in New York City, a post he assumed in 1904.” When an antisemitic German preacher named Hermann Ahlwardt gave speeches in the city, Roosevelt assigned a contingent of Jewish police officers to guard the man.
Roosevelt was also a Zionist. In 1918, shortly after the Balfour Declaration, he wrote: “It seems to me that it is entirely proper to start a Zionist state around Jerusalem.” He told Lioubomir Michailovitch, the Serbian Minister to the United States, that “there can be no peace worth having … unless the Jews [are] given control of Palestine.” Six months later Roosevelt died in his sleep.
Not all his descendants would share his belief in Jewish self-determination, however.
Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s grandchildren, Kermit and Archie, served their country in the CIA during the early years of the Cold War. Both were keenly interested in Middle East affairs, and were fluent in Arabic. Both were well read and highly educated, authoring books and filing dispatches for newspapers like the Saturday Evening Post, among others.
They were also prominent anti-Zionists.
Kermit Roosevelt, known as “Kim,” played a key role in anti-Zionist efforts in the United States and abroad. He was not, by the standards of his time, an antisemite. But he was ardently opposed to the creation of Israel.
As Hugh Wilford observed in his 2013 book America’s Great Game: The CIA’s Secret Arabists and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East: “the anti-Zionism of the overt Cold War foreign policy establishment is well known” but “less widely appreciated is the opposition to Jewish statehood of the individuals responsible for setting up the United States’ covert apparatus in the Middle East.”
This began with the OSS, the CIA’s precursor. And it included men like Stephen Penrose, a former American University of Beirut instructor, and Kim Roosevelt’s boss during his wartime service in the OSS.
“Documents among Penrose’s personal papers reveal him engaged in a variety of anti-Zionist activities at the same time that he was commencing his official duties with the OSS,” Wilford notes.
Like many of his fellow Arabists, Penrose was the son of American missionaries who, failing to convert the native population to Christianity, sought to foster Arab nationalism instead. Penrose described himself as a “chief cook” who was “brewing” opposition to Zionism. He became one of Kim Roosevelt’s mentors.
In a January 1948 Middle East Journal article entitled, “Partition of Palestine: A Lesson in Pressure Politics,” Kim called the 1947 UN vote in favor of a Jewish state an “instructive and disturbing story.”
Roosevelt believed that the US media was unduly supportive of the creation of Israel, and claimed that almost all Americans “with diplomatic, educational, missionary, or business experience in the Middle East” opposed Zionism.
Kim’s pamphlet was reprinted by the Institute for Arab American Affairs, a New York-based group whose board he sat on. He also began working with the Arab League’s Washington, D.C., office and “turned elsewhere for allies in the anti-Zionist struggle, starting with the Protestant missionaries, educators, and aid workers.”
This nascent group soon received financial support from the American oil industry, which maintained close links to Kim’s OSS/CIA colleague, William Eddy.
As Wilford noted, the Arabian consortium ARAMCO “launched a public relations campaign intended to bring American opinion around to the Arab point of view.”
In addition to missionaries and big oil, Kim gained another important ally in the form of Elmer Berger, a rabbi from Flint, Michigan. Berger served as executive director of the American Council for Judaism, an anti-Zionist group that, among other things, opposed the creation of a Jewish army during World War II at the height of the Holocaust. Berger and Roosevelt became drinking buddies and close collaborators on their joint effort against the Jewish State.
Kim eventually became “organizing secretary” for a group called The Committee for Justice and Peace. The committee’s original chair, Virginia Gildersleeve, was both a longtime friend of the Roosevelts of Oyster Bay and the dean of New York City’s Barnard College, which today is part of Columbia.
Gildersleeve was “also a high-profile anti-Zionist” who “became involved with the Arab cause through her association with the Arabist philanthropist Charles Crane and the historian of Arab nationalism George Antonius.”
Crane, a wealthy and notorious antisemite, had lobbied against the creation of a Jewish state since the beginning of the 20th century, even advising then-President Woodrow Wilson against supporting the Balfour Declaration.
By 1950, the Committee had managed to recruit famed journalist Dorothy Thompson to their cause. Thompson was reportedly the basis for actress Katharine Hepburn’s character in the 1942 movie Woman of the Year. A convert to anti-Zionism, Thompson’s extensive network of reporters and celebrities proved crucial to Kim and Berger’s efforts to rally opposition to the Jewish State. In a 1951 letter to Barnard College’s Gildersleeve, Thompson wrote: “I am seriously concerned about the position of the Jews in the United States.” People, she claimed, “are beginning to ask themselves the question: who is really running America?”
Another ally emerged that year: the Central Intelligence Agency.
The CIA began funding the Committee, as well as its successor, the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME). Beginning in June 1950, Kim’s correspondence with Berger began making veiled references to the ACJ head taking on “official work” in Washington. This, Wilford believes, is a reference to working with the CIA. Indeed, the well-connected Kim and Archie Roosevelt had known top CIA officials like Allan Dulles since childhood.
With support from figures like Eddy, AFME also began encouraging Muslim-Christian alliances — ostensibly to counter Soviet influence, but also to attack the Jewish state. This led to some awkward alliances, including with Amin al-Husseini, the founding father of Palestinian nationalism and an infamous Nazi collaborator.
Husseini had ordered the murders of rival Palestinians, incited violence against Jews since the 1920s, and had led forces, equipped with Nazi-supplied arms, to destroy Israel at its rebirth in 1948. Now, along with the Secretary General of the Arab League, and Saudi King Ibn Saud, he was meeting with Eddy to discuss a “moral alliance” between Christians and Muslims to defeat communism. Kim himself knew Husseini, having interviewed him for the Saturday Evening Post after World War II.
AFME lobbied for the appointment of anti-Zionist diplomats and in favor of Eisenhower administration efforts to withhold aid from Israel. And both Berger and Thompson pushed for favorable coverage of the new Egyptian dictator, Gamal Nassar, who would wage war on the Jewish state for nearly two decades. Initially, they were successful, with TIME magazine writing that Nasser had the “lithe grace of a big, handsome, all-American quarterback.” Of course, there was nothing “all-American” about Nasser, who would become a Soviet stooge.
AFME officials like Garland Evans Hopkins would draw rebukes after claiming that Jews were bringing violence against themselves — a staple of antisemitism. Hopkins claimed that Zionists “could produce a wave of antisemitism in this country” if they continued acting against “America’s best interests in the Middle East.”
AFME itself would eventually lose influence, particularly after its boosting of figures like Nasser was revealed as foolhardy. Berger would go on to advise Senator J. William Fulbright (D-AR) in his efforts to get pro-Israel Americans to register as foreign agents.
In 1967, as Arab forces gathered to annihilate Israel, Berger blamed the Jewish State, accusing it of “aggression” and its supporters of “hysteria.” Top ACJ officials resigned in protest. That same year, Ramparts magazine exposed CIA support, financial and otherwise, of AFME.
Kim and Archie Roosevelt, however, would continue their careers as high-ranking CIA officers before eventually starting a consulting business and making use of their extensive Middle East contacts.
For some college protesters, attacking Israel — and American support for Israel — might seem new and trendy. Yet, both the CIA and big oil were precisely doing that, decades ago, forming alliances with anti-American dictators, antisemitic war criminals, the press, Protestant groups, academics, university administrators, and fringe Jewish groups claiming to represent “what’s best” for American Jewry.
As William Faulkner once wrote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
The writer is a Senior Research Analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis
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For Venezuela’s historic Jewish community, the earthquake is a crisis they can’t afford
Less than two hours after two powerful earthquakes left hundreds dead and thousands missing in northern Venezuela, including its capital city of Caracas, families whose homes had been rendered unlivable began to make their way to Hebraica, the Jewish community center in Caracas, where they spent the night sleeping on beach chairs and in cars parked on the center’s football field.
That night, more than 400 people sought refuge.
“Based on all the years of hardships we’ve had — massive power outages and other problems — the community already knows where they can go if something happens,” said Roberto Mishkin, president of the Union Israelita de Caracas, the country’s largest Ashkenazi Jewish congregation, adding that aftershocks are still rattling the area.
“A lot of people don’t want to return because they live on high floors. They’re scared.”
The sprawling campus of Hebraica— built decades ago when Venezuela’s Jewish population numbered around 30,000 — has become an emergency shelter, complete with mattresses, medical care, communal meals and preparations for Shabbat.
According to community leaders, two members of Venezuela’s Jewish community have been confirmed dead, and several others remain missing. Hundreds more are displaced — their houses destroyed or severely damaged.
“People are worried, very worried, very anguished, and a lot of people don’t know if they can go back to their homes,” said Elias Farache, the former president of the Sephardic community in Venezuela and a former leader of the Venezuelan Zionist Federation.
“It’s the club, so people feel very comfortable in this place,” he added, explaining that the tight-knit community has found comfort in gathering together.
Mishkin says Venezuela’s Jews have been in dire straits for years. Before the earthquake, more than 300 Jewish families received food and medicine through local Jewish organizations such as Keren Ezra, which receives support from international partners, including the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, commonly known as the Joint.
Under normal circumstances, Keren Ezra distributes staples such as raw chicken, rice and other groceries. Now, many families no longer have kitchens, so Keren Ezra has been distributing tuna, rice, crackers, cookies, coffee and other emergency supplies to people seeking shelter at Hebraica. Hundreds of displaced people are relying on the organization’s reserves.
“We’re trying to manage the problems as they come, because to be hysterical doesn’t help,” said Syma Farache, a Caracas-based community member and the director of Keren Ezra. “We do have products in stock for emergencies. We buy them four months in advance, but now we realize it’s not enough because we didn’t expect this.”
Several Israeli and international Jewish organizations are working to send aid and rescue teams to Venezuela. Because Israel does not maintain an embassy or consulate in the country (former President Hugo Chávez severed diplomatic ties with Israel in 2009), Jewish community leaders are also coordinating with Venezuelan authorities to facilitate the arrival of these personnel. The first of these organizations began arriving on Friday, with the Jewish humanitarian organization CADENA reaching Venezuela, and an Israeli rescue team expected to arrive on Sunday. Others, including IsraAID and the Joint, remain on standby until Caracas’ airport reopens.
Farache said while there is no shortage of supplies yet, there could be if the airport does not open soon.
For now, community leaders are trying desperately to maintain a sense of normalcy. On Friday, they purchased mattresses so evacuees would no longer have to sleep in their cars or on beach chairs. A rabbi plans to spend Shabbat at the community center, while volunteers prepare cholent, the traditional Shabbat stew, to feed the displaced. Early next week, organizers hope to open a communal kitchen for those who cannot afford to purchase meals.
But addressing the immediate aftermath is only the beginning. Hundreds of displaced people will need housing
“Now everybody here is safe,” Mishkin said. “We’re feeding a few families, and we’re trying to make do, but this is a very poor community.”
He recalled that Venezuela’s Jewish community was once among Latin America’s most prosperous. The community has declined sharply over the past two decades, from a peak of 30,000, as part of a broader exodus that saw 7 million people leave the country due to political, economic and social challenges, including rising antisemitism.
The economy has seen a slight upturn since U.S. forces removed Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in January, but day-to-day life for most residents remains a struggle. Community institutions have continued to serve members and adapt to the new reality, all while struggling to raise money for social services.
“We used to be a donor community. We sent money all over the world,” Mishkin said. “After 25 years of a complicated country, we have an elderly and not economically prosperous community. Most of the people whose houses are severely damaged are not going to be able to afford to fix them.”
Without property insurance, many families will have few options. Many also lost their businesses.
“They cannot stay on a mattress forever,” Mishkin said. “They cannot afford, on their own, the repairs or a new place to live. That’s our main concern—how to help these families have a decent place to live.”
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Texas creates required reading list that includes Anne Frank and the Bible
(JTA) — Texas instituted on Friday the nation’s first-ever statewide K-12 required reading list for public schools. Students in public schools will soon be required to read Anne Frank’s diary and a host of Bible passages, along with other Jewish- and Holocaust-related texts.
The decision has drawn vigorous objections from some of the state’s Jews. Several local rabbis and other Jewish leaders pushed back on the proposal during the public comment period in the lead-up to the vote this week because of concerns including injecting Christian content into the schools.
In a vote Friday of nine to five, the Republican-controlled state education board approved the list, mandating reading selections usually left to individual schools and teachers. The curriculum will go into effect in 2030 and apply to the roughly 5.5 million schoolchildren in Texas public schools.
The move comes as the board has increasingly sought to incorporate Christianity into the state’s public schools, including in 2024 when it approved an optional Bible curriculum for elementary schools that drew pushback from Jewish parents and advocates. Last year, Republican lawmakers in the state also required the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom.
The passage of the reading list follows an effort by the state’s conservative education leaders to reverse a nationwide decline in the number of books read or assigned in class and exercise control over the texts students are exposed to.
In recent years, Texas has been at the forefront of the national wave of book removals, with several districts pulling books about the Holocaust and Jewish history, including versions of Anne Frank’s diary. Decisions by the state education board have historically had an effect on schools nationwide, in part because of the vast population of school age students in the state.
The new reading list, which spans over 150 titles, includes Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night”; Lois Lowry’s young-reader Holocaust novel “Number the Stars”; George Washington’s letter to a Rhode Island synagogue in 1790, and the “original edition” of Frank’s diary. Conservatives, including in Texas, have objected to a graphic novel version that illustrates passages in which the diarist describes her sexual longings.
Other books on the list include “Charlotte’s Web” by E. B. White and “Animal Farm” by George Orwell.
Beginning in the fourth grade, students will also be required to read numerous passages from both the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, a requirement that has drawn fierce opposition from some Texas Jewish leaders.
Board members continued to propose last-minute additions to the list right up until the vote Friday afternoon, adding the Biblical parable Jonah and the Whale to the first grade curriculum.
The final reading list was pared down from roughly 300 texts after the board initially discussed the proposal in February. At the time, state education board leaders told JTA that they had consulted with experts including the Texas Holocaust, Genocide, and Antisemitism Advisory Commission, a state government body.
On Monday, a host of rabbis and Jewish leaders attended a Board of Education meeting to voice their opposition to the reading list, including Joshua Fixler, a rabbi at Houston’s Reform Congregation Emanu El.
“There is a difference between teaching about religion and teaching religion, and these texts are going to put Texas teachers in the position of teaching religion to our kids,” Fixler told JTA following Friday’s vote.
Fixler said he believed the required reading list would cause children of all faiths to feel “alienated and isolated” because they would “see the state endorsement of one particular religious tradition.”
Fixler particularly objected to “Night” being part of the same eighth-grade unit as chapter three of the Book of Lamentations, which discusses the destruction of Solomon’s Temple in Jerusalem as God’s punishment for the sins of the Jews.
“To associate that with a Holocaust text like Elie Wiesel’s classic work of ‘Night’ is to imply that the Jews might in some way be responsible for the Holocaust,” Fixler, who has three children in Texas public schools, explained.
Rabbi Neil F. Blumofe, the senior rabbi of Conservative Congregation Agudas Achim in Austin, said that he was concerned that the list’s focus on Holocaust-based text would reduce students’ understanding of Jewish history.
“If one only teaches the Jewish civilization or religion as catastrophe-based, I think that that gives a narrow focus, and also can cause issues of what Judaism is and what its relevancy is currently versus what it used to be in the past,” Blumofe said.
Blumofe added that he had “yet to see an effective curriculum or teacher’s guide or ways to sensitively recognize that these are works of civilization versus works of a particular theology.”
Laney Hawes, the co-founder of Texas Freedom to Read Project, told JTA that she was “seething” over the result of Friday’s vote.
“The lists are promoting a singular narrow ideology,” Hawes said, adding that while proponents of the required reading stressed that it promoted “Judeo-Christian values,” she believed it excluded Jewish perspectives.
“I want my children to have a worldview that is vast and diverse,” Hawes, who is not Jewish, said. “If they’re going to be forced to read certain books, I want those books to represent a plethora of perspectives, not just one world view.”
Fixler and Hawes said that they planned to gather with other local advocates to consider ways to fight the new curriculum. For Fixler, he hoped the outcome would emphasize for others the importance of voting in school board elections.
“I think that this should be a wake-up call to people who have been sleeping about the ways in which Christian nationalism is shaping policy on local, state and federal levels,” he said.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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The biggest Jewish issue in New York’s most Jewish primary wasn’t really Israel
Much of the pro-Israel world seems to have seen New York’s Tuesday Democratic primaries as bad for the Jews. When it comes to at least one race, that perspective needs revising.
Yes, Brad Lander, who is highly critical of Israel, defeated the AIPAC-backed incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in NY-10 — which, according to the Jewish Electorate Institute, boasts the second-highest number of Jewish voters of any district in the country. But seeing that result as “bad for the Jews” misunderstands what the candidates, both of whom are Jewish and self-professed Zionists, were arguing about.
Both are motivated by a profound wish to protect Jews in the United States from rising hatred. Both understand how high the stakes are. What divided them was the question of how to govern well for Jews — a new iteration of a dispute between two robust strains of Jewish thought that extend deep into our shared history.
Both Lander and Goldman ran on their Jewish identities and built explicit plans for confronting antisemitism into their pitches to voters.
Goldman called himself a “proud Zionist,” and told the NY Jewish Week “I do think there is an undercurrent of antisemitism in the degree to which AIPAC seems to be vilified,” even as he said he’d pushed AIPAC to be more willing to criticize the Israeli government.
Lander, upon winning by an almost two-to-one margin, told supporters, “I will be one of the Jewish members of Congress most willing to stand up for Palestinian human rights, and I will stand firmly against bigotry aimed at Jews. Those are not two different jobs. They are the same job.”
Both men accepted, as a starting premise, that antisemitism is rising and real. What they disagreed about was where the danger is concentrated, and which set of political alliances will actually help contain it.
Goldman focused on concerns about the political left’s tendency to treat Zionism as suspect. He prioritized standing with Israel, staying close to its institutional defenders, and refusing to let the loudest progressive critics define what counts as acceptable Jewish politics.
Lander, instead, argued that conflating support for the Israeli government with Jewish safety leaves Jews exposed if and when that government’s policies become impossible to defend. His strategy: decouple Jewish identity from Israeli state policy, ally with the growing progressive coalition in New York politics, and fight antisemitism from inside that coalition’s ranks rather than outside and against it.
Both of these approaches draw from recognizable, longstanding strains of American Jewish thought. Goldman hewed to the camp of covenantal loyalty first and foremost to the Jewish people, and, by extension, to Israel as a sacred trust. And Lander hewed to the camp of universalist ethics and solidarity with the marginalized.
To call one of those stances worse for Jews than the other ignores the historical truth that both are deeply grounded in American Jewish life. But there is something potentially troubling for Jews about this contest: the evident truth, which it displayed, that the rift between these two schools of American Judaism is widening rather than closing.
That split isn’t really about the state of Israel. It’s a much older argument inside Jewish thought, about whether Jewish ethics point outward or inward first.
The universalist strand understands much of the Hebrew Bible, and centuries of subsequent commentary, as promoting the idea that justice is owed to everyone. It lives by the instruction to remember that we were once strangers in Egypt and the commandment that the same law applies to the stranger as to the native-born. It follows the prophets who reserved their harshest words not for the Jewish people’s enemies, but for that people’s own failures to protect the poor and the powerless.
According to this reading, Jews must practice solidarity with anyone suffering. A Jewish politics that didn’t extend itself to advocating for Palestinians, immigrants, or any other group facing state violence would be failing the tradition rather than honoring it.
The particularist strand reads the same texts and the same history and draws an opposite lesson: that universalism without a prior, unapologetic loyalty to one’s own people is exactly the moral posture that left Jews undefended for most of their history. This strand sees that loyalty as a structural condition that allows Jewish communal survival. To its gaze, a Jewish politics that can’t put Jewish safety first, especially after the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, has lost its way.
What makes the tension between these stances difficult to resolve is that both readings are genuinely supported by the textual and historical record, which is long and varied enough to furnish ammunition for either side without anyone needing to misquote it.
Goldman and Lander didn’t invent this fight. They just gave New York’s most Jewish congressional district a chance to vote on it again, in a fresh context, with the war in Gaza standing in for whatever the live test case happened to be a generation ago — and whatever it will be will be in the next crisis in Jewish history.
That divide is part of why framing progressive victories on New York’s primary night as a loss for Jews flattens something more interesting happening inside NY-10 specifically. This election was a fight between two Jewish candidates, on some of the most Jewish terrain in the entire country, with each offering a fully worked-out theory of how to keep Jews safe, and each able to point to real receipts.
That is not a fight over whether Jews matter in New York politics. It is a fight over which of two coalitions — one anchored to Israel and institutional Jewish groups, and one tied to the multiracial progressive coalition reshaping the city — is the safer harbor for American Jews going forward.
It’s fair to be concerned about how bitter that fight seems to be becoming. But it’s also fair to celebrate the fact that Jewish life can still maintain such rich ideological diversity. This was a constructive political race conducted between Jews, waged substantially in Jewish terms, over which political strategy actually protects Jewish life in a moment when antisemitism is on the rise. It’s arguable that to have the choice between candidates like Goldman and Lander, who take their own Jewishness seriously enough to fight about what it should mean in American politics, is actually very good for the Jews.
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