Two Jews, Two Careers

By Steve Rodan

They lived in the same city, served in the same legislature and came from similar backgrounds. But Sol Bloom and Emanuel Celler could not have been more different in their response to Hitler's extermination of Europe's Jews.

Sol Bloom was a tummler, Yiddish for entertainer. The son of Polish Jews, Bloom became a success in vaudeville -- first as an eight-year-old actor and then as a producer and music publisher. By the time he was 18, he was making the incredible sum of $25,000 a year. But politics ran in his blood, and sponsored by Tammany Hall, he was elected to the House of Representatives in 1922. His constituents came from the Silk Stocking, or the 19th District, in Manhattan, filled with elitist Jews. After four years in the House, the Democrat took the unusual step of challenging the anti-Semite Henry Ford, which made many Jews uncomfortable.

"I had been chosen to run because I was [an] amiable and solvent Jew," Bloom wrote in his autobiography.

Bloom's rise came during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a fellow New Yorker and former governor who drew heavily on Jewish votes and money. In 1939, Roosevelt approved the appointment of Bloom, by now nearly 70, as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. His role was to serve the Roosevelt administration. As Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long, one of the leading anti-Semites in the administration, put it, Bloom was "terribly ambitious for publicity."

The result was that Bloom became a tool in Roosevelt's policy of denying aid, let alone shelter, to the Jews in German-occupied Europe. The State Department line was that the Jews were spies of Hitler. In June 1941, Congress enacted legislation by Bloom that authorized U.S. consuls to deny any visa request on grounds that the applicant marked a threat to public safety. This, as the German Bund was goose-stepping at the edge of Bloom's district in upper Manhattan.

When Roosevelt needed a fig leaf to defend his no-Jew policy, Bloom was the man. He was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Bermuda Conference in April 1943, which refused to even consider a haven for those marked for Germany's Final Solution.

Perhaps the most distasteful episode in Bloom's career was his virulent opposition to publicizing the plight of the Jews. He tried to stop protests of the killing in Europe and worked to deport Peter Bergson, whose group lobbied Washington for rescue. Bloom worked closely with Rabbi Stephen Wise -- another fervent supporter of the president -- despite their mutual animosity.

Emanuel Celler was far younger than Bloom. Born in 1888 to a whiskey distiller in the working-class neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, N.Y., Celler was a stellar student, graduating from Columbia Law School in 1912. A decade later, he ran for Congress as a Tammany Hall Democrat and won, holding on to his seat for nearly 50 years, the second longest tenure in the history of Congress.

Unlike Bloom, Celler was moved by the refugee and immigrant. He opposed legislation meant to reduce Jewish immigration from Eastern Europe, particularly during the 1930s. During World War II, an elderly rabbi with a cane arrived at his unlocked home on Sunday and urged the representative to save the Jews. When Celler said Roosevelt had told him that he could not use warships to bring Jews out of Europe, the rabbi said, ""If six million cattle had been slaughtered, there would have been greater interest."

Celler's efforts to rescue European Jews ran into a brick wall. Wise and his Zionist colleagues opposed the establishment of safe havens and increased immigration to the United States. He called for the resignation of the State Department's Long and criticized Roosevelt's refusal to help the Jews -- whether in Europe or Palestine. He helped Bergson in the formation of what became the War Refugee Board in 1944, the only agency that addressed Jewish rescue.

After World War II, Celler met greater success. By this time, he was appointed to chair the House Judiciary Committee. He again fought the State Department and Congress that shut America's doors to the survivors of Hitler. In 1948, he helped pass legislation that allowed 339,000 displaced persons, many of them Jewish, into the United States. Over the next 17 years, some 600,000 Holocaust survivors reached American shores.

"I fought against the unjust restriction of immigration into the United States," Celler said after he was defeated in House elections in 1973.

It would be unfair to simply label Bloom the bad guy and Celler the good guy. Bloom was selected as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee precisely because he would obey the State Department and White House. To bolster Bloom's credibility with the Jews, State approved the entry of a handful of prominent rabbis during World War II. He did not try for much more.

Celler fought U.S. immigration policy and the White House refusal to rescue Jews. But he achieved little. He did not chair any committee that dealt with either the war, immigration or foreign policy. He was often opposed by other Jews who maintained access to the president or his aides.

And that is perhaps the rub of Jews who rise high in American public life. Virtually all of them are convinced that their careers depend on ignoring their people -- even in their hour of need. Late in the war, Bloom pledged to help bring 31,000 European Jews into Palestine. That promise faded when he failed to obtain the support of either the State Department or White House.

Like many Jews in public life, Bloom argued that he represented the interests of America -- implying that these interests were congruent with Hitler's extermination of Jews. When he died in 1949, Bloom's funeral was attended by 3,000 people at the West Side Institutional Synagogue. His coffin was draped with the American flag.

Below: Sol Bloom, [left] with Roosevelt.