Many American Jews shuddered as Donald Trump proclaimed, “The American Dream is dead!” and “America first!” to rally crowds during his 2016 presidential campaign. We remembered how, in the late 1930s and early 1940s, these slogans were an open call for virulent anti-Semitism, pro-Nazi sentiment, white supremacy, xenophobia, and nativism.

Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature and humanities at the University of London, deftly deconstructs the origins and evolution of those two highly charged phrases in her new book Behold, America: The Entangled History of “America First” and “The American Dream” (Basic Books).

The term “The American Dream” first appeared in a 1900 editorial in the New York Evening Post, a newspaper founded by Alexander Hamilton and owned today by Rupert Murdoch. It warned readers that “discontented multimillionaires” constitute the “greatest risk” to “every republic” and threatened “The American Dream.” In its original context, the term represented a broad-based progressive aspiration for a just, equitable, and freedom-loving society.

German Lutheran Pastor Martin Niemöller is best known for his celebrated confession:
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• First, they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Communist.
• Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Socialist.
• Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
• Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
• Because I was not a Jew.
• Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

These oft-quoted words at Holocaust commemorative observances might lead you to believe that Niemöller was sympathetic to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. Not true.

Matthew D. Hockenos, professor of History at Skidmore College and author of Then They Came for Me (Basic Books, 2018), writes that Niemöller (1892-1984) was not incarcerated in concentration camps because he opposed the mass murder of Jews or other atrocities, but for insisting on the political autonomy of German Protestant churches in Nazi Germany.

Does the world need yet another book about Adolf Hitler?

To my mind, three British prominent historians – Alan Bullock, Richard J. Evans, and Ian Kershaw – have definitively covered the subject for English-speaking readers.

Still, fascination of the German Fuhrer does not abate, as evidenced by Cory Taylor’s addition to the genre with How Hitler Was Made: Germany and the Rise of the Perfect Nazi (Prometheus Books, Amherst, New York, 2018).  An Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker, Taylor delves into Germany’s post-World War I years (1918-1924), the time when Hitler became “the perfect Nazi.”  
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The first 104 pages of his 274-page book detail the political upheavals in Munich, the Bavarian capital, during the six chaotic years following the 1918 Armistice and the collapse of the German Empire. We learn of Soviet-style leaders in Bavaria, coups and counter-coups, assassinations, street clashes pitting Communists against armed right-wing army veterans, and the emergence of gangs of thugs who emulated the brutal tactics of Italian fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.

In Mavericks, Mystics & False Messiahs: Episodes from the Margins of Jewish History, Pini Dunner provides a series of bizarre stories describing how some Jews crashed through conventional guardrails of staid Jewish tradition and sped forward onto aberrant lanes of false messiahs, forgers of Passover Haggadot, rabbis searching for subversive religious meanings of Hebrew amulets, and an 18th-century British lord who converted to Judaism. Best of all, there is the raffish tale of a 20th-century Jewish con man who makes all other imposters in history look like amateur frauds.

Dunner, an Orthodox rabbi who leads a Beverly Hills, California, congregation, combines an expertise in ancient Hebrew manuscripts with a command of rabbinic texts and Jewish history to bring his band of Jewish miscreants to life.  

Heading Dunner’s list is the infamous Shabbatai Tzvi (1626-1676). Born in Turkey, Shabbatai attracted a large number of Jewish followers who fervently believed he was the long awaited Messiah. Dunner writes:

“…he [Shabbatai]  was …joyful, exuberant, and ecstatic, while at other times he was depressed, anxious, paranoid, and passive…symptoms of acute manic depression, or bipolar syndrome…To [his] detractors his behavior was evidence he was an evil madman. To his supporters… his strange behavior attested to the fact that he was divine and a holy man.”
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On May 31, 1665 Shabbatai publicly declared he was the “King of the Jews” and the “Redeemer” of Israel. His followers were delirious with joy, especially because Shabbatai Tzvi had repudiated much of the rigorous religious and moral laws of Judaism and encouraged wild sexual excesses.

(RNS) — The brutality of anti-Semitism in several forms dominated the top 10 news stories related to Jews and Judaism this year. But there were important and even happy developments as well.
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1. The Tree of Life synagogue shooting
The “slaughter of the innocents” in a Pittsburgh synagogue in October was the single worst anti-Jewish attack in U.S. history, with 11 worshippers killed (among them were two of my cousins, Cecil and David Rosenthal). The swift public revulsion and denunciation of the massacre cut across all religious, ethnic and racial boundaries and resulted in a vast outpouring of support for the American Jewish community.

2. U.S. embassy moves to Jerusalem
In May, the U.S. embassy in Israel officially relocated from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, as President Trump followed through on a December 2017 announcement. The move, met with both celebration and foreboding from political and faith leaders at the time, has been largely overwhelmed by other events, including violent attempts to breach the Jewish state’s borders by Palestinians in Gaza, Iran’s continued support of the brutal Syrian regime and the terrorist group Hezbollah based in Lebanon, and the discovery of several Hezbollah secret military tunnels that encroached into Israeli territory. Though Saudi Arabia’s King Salman was among those who criticized the embassy move, Israel strengthened its diplomatic outreach to Saudi Arabia this year.
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(RNS) — On a chilly, rainy Sunday in April 1991, my wife Marcia and I were among a small number of religious leaders who spent nearly six hours with President George H.W. Bush at Camp David. We were there for the dedication service of the newly constructed interreligious chapel at the presidential retreat in Maryland, which had also served as a relaxed but conducive place for top-level diplomatic negotiations.

For more than two years, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Greek Orthodox clergy and laypeople and myself, the sole Jewish member of the group, had worked together to raise private funds for a building to be used for worship, study, and meditation by presidents, their families, camp support staff and, of course, visiting world leaders.
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FDR was the first chief executive to use the former Boy Scout campsite north of Washington as an escape from the brutal Washington summer heat. Though the exact location was kept from the public — President Roosevelt called the retreat “Shangri-La,” adding to its mystery — it is only seventy-four miles from the capital in the Catoctin mountains of Maryland.

Since 1968, I have been a professional "Catholic watcher." As the American Jewish Committee's interreligious director and senior interreligious adviser, I have joined with hundreds of priests, nuns, seminarians, lay people and parochial school students on a myriad of pioneering Catholic-Jewish educational programs and projects, academic conferences, media appearances and countless visits to the Vatican, Israel, Germany and Poland.

I have had 15 personal meetings with Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI and authored a book describing how three American cardinals — Richard Cushing, Francis Spellman and John O'Connor — played major roles in the adoption and implementation of the Second Vatican Council's Nostra Aetate declaration that called for mutual respect, knowledge and understanding between Catholics and Jews.
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I have been an overnight guest in numerous monasteries and spoken publicly in St. Patrick's Cathedral and in other Catholic churches. I hold honorary doctorates from St. Leo University and St. Martin's University, and I am a proud co-founder of the Center for Catholic-Jewish Studies on the St. Leo campus in Florida and a professor of religion at that university.

Martin Fletcher, the former NBC bureau chief in Israel, describes his 409-page novel in three words: “Exodus meets ‘Dallas.’” And indeed it is.

Instead of focusing on contemporary Israel, Fletcher goes back to the years between 1948 and 1967, a period in which the Jewish state more than tripled its population from about 800,000 to 2.7 million.

Promised Land: A Novel of Israel spans the two dangerous decades when Israel, frequently alone on the world stage, confronted extraordinary military, cultural, political, and economic challenges. It was an era that began with Israeli independence and ended with the Six-Day War.
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Like many authors of ambitious sweeping historical novels, Fletcher focuses on members of a single family to tell the dramatic story of how Israel absorbed hundreds of thousands of immigrants, mainly traumatized Holocaust survivors and Sephardic Jews from Muslim countries.

November 11 marks the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I. Leaders on both sides invoked God and religion as they sent more than 5.5 million soldiers to die on battlefields across continents. 

Kaiser Wilhelm’s troops were outfitted with belt buckles inscribed with the words: “Gott mit uns” (God is with us).

The sheikh-ul Islam of the Ottoman Empire urged Muslims everywhere to “go to the Jihad for the sake of happiness and salvation … in accordance with God’s beautiful promise [that] those who sacrifice their lives to give life to the truth will have honor in this world, and their latter end is paradise.”   
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President Woodrow Wilson, a Presbyterian minister’s son, urged Congress to declare war on Germany in April 1917, saying “…the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness…God helping her, she can do no other.”

Simon Levis Sullam, who teaches modern history at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, has written a well-researched book that shatters the widely-held belief that Italians were brava gente, “good people,” who protected their Jewish fellow citizens from the horrors of the Holocaust.

The postwar government in Rome nurtured the false belief that the inherent “tolerance” of Italians rendered them incapable of collaborating in “the genocide” of the nation’s Jews. Not surprisingly, this characterization struck a responsive public chord among Italians. Western societies, too, were receptive to the benign, almost comedic image of Italians. The fascist dictator, Benito Mussolini, was often portrayed as a strutting buffoon, a farcical refugee of the operatic stage. 
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In fact, on November 17, 1938, (a week after Kristallnacht took place in Germany and Austria), the Mussolini regime adopted a series of harsh laws that denied Italian Jews their civil rights and removed them from public office and institutions of higher education. Other Fascist laws deprived Jews of their assets, limited their travel, and forbade sexual relations and marriages between Jews and “racially pure” Italians. 
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