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Opinion

Jews fought and died for America

It is easy to fall into the trap of assuming that all diaspora Jews are bookish

April 23, 2021 12:36
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3 min read

A few blocks from my home in Washington DC, nestled discreetly on a leafy side street, is the National Museum of American Jewish Military History. I’ve walked past this museum 100 times and always promised myself that I’d stop by for a proper look. This being my last week in Washington — I’m moving home to London after five years — I decided on a recent stroll that it was now or never.

Jewish diasporic military history has always intrigued me, I think because to many people it appears like a paradox: that bookish Jews somehow don’t belong on the battlefield. Of course, in reality, that’s nonsense: some half a million Jews served in the American military in the Second World War alone. Eleven thousand died.

The museum itself is small but intriguing, telling the story of Jews in the American military from the earliest days of the nation. It starts in 1654 with Asser Levy, one of the first Jews to settle in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam. As the fledgling colony battled with nearby New Sweden on the Delaware River, Levy was keen to join the New Amsterdam militia and do his bit. But governor Peter Stuyvesant wouldn’t let Jews serve, demanding that they pay an extra exemption tax instead. Levy appealed to the colony’s government in Holland, who allowed him to do his duty.

So began the long story of Jewish military life in America. “From the day of the founding of the republic, we have had no struggle in which there have not been citizens of Jewish faith who played an eminent part,” said President Teddy Roosevelt, in words splayed across the wall of the museum. Dotted around this exhibition are mementos from that story. Eugene Cohn has donated sketchings of Japanese kamikaze attacks at Okinawa; Herbert Stone a firing pin removed from a German mine on Omaha beach. This being a Jewish museum, there’s also a section devoted to detailing “A Mother’s Grief”.