I appreciate the comments, suggestions, and criticisms of earlier versions of this essay, particularly those of Ava Chamberlain, Aryeh Goren, Jeffrey Gurock, Roger Horowitz, Kathleen Joyce, Laura Levitt, Elizabeth McAlister, Leonard Primiano, Jennifer Rycenga, Mel Scult, Jeffrey Shandler, Daniel Soyer, Russell F. Weigley, and Beth Wenger.

1. Bellush, Bernard, “Roosevelt's Legacy,” Forward, March 12, 1995, 7.Google Scholar

2. Four Freedoms quoted in Burns, James MacGregor, Roosevelt: The Soldier of Freedom, 1940-45 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1970), 34.Google Scholar

3. See, most notably, Wyman, David S., The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984)Google Scholar; and Wyman, David S., Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1968).Google Scholar See also Bauer, Yehuda, American Jewry and the Holocaust: The American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, 1939-1945 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Penkower, Monty, The Jews Were Expendable (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983)Google Scholar; Breitman, Richard and Kraut, Alan, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry, 1933-1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; Lipstadt, Deborah, Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust (New York: Free Press, 1986)Google Scholar; and Berman, Aaron, Nazism, the Jews and American Zionism, 1933-1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990).Google Scholar Henry Feingold's work is an exception, although his first book, The Politics of Rescue: The Roosevelt Administration and the Holocaust, 1938-1945 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1970), places the issue of rescue at center stage.

4. Dawidowicz, Lucy, On Equal Terms: Jews in America, 1881-1981 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), 129.Google Scholar

5. Essrig, Harry, “The Jewish Chaplain Views American Living,” Reconstructionist, April 5, 1946, 10–11.Google Scholar

6. Kraut, Benny, “A Wary Collaboration: Jews, Catholics and the Protestant Goodwill Movement,” in Between the Times: The Travail of the Protestant Establishment in America, 1900-1960, ed. Hutchison, William R. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 194.Google Scholar

7. Silk, Mark, “Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America,” American Quarterly 36, no. 1 (Spring 1984): 66 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wallace, Henry A., “Judaism and Americanism,” Menorah Journal 28, no. 2 (July-September 1940): 127, 123, 137.Google Scholar

8. Julian Morgenstern, “Judaism's Contribution to Post-War Religion,” Hebrew Union College pamphlet, quoted in Silk, “Notes on the JudeoChristian Tradition,” 68.

9. Szyk, Arthur, “Self Defense in Warsaw,” Jewish Forum, January 1944, 21 Google Scholar; Cohen, Mortimer J., “Arthur Szyk—Artist and Jew,” Reconstructionist, June 14, 1946, 10–11.Google Scholar

10. However, “with the Japs it's different. They hate the Japs.” Lashner, Ari, “An Evening's Discussion,” Correspondence Section, Furrows, June 1943, 30.Google Scholar

11. Weil, Frank L., “Greetings,” in A Book of Jewish Thoughts, by Hertz, Joseph H. (New York: National Jewish Welfare Board, 1943), vii–viii.Google Scholar

12. Goldberg, Joshua L., “A Jewish Chaplain in the Navy ,” Jewish Forum, January 1943, 7.Google Scholar

13. In his history of the chaplaincy, Jewish, Rabbis at War: The CANRA Story (Waltham, Mass.: American Jewish Historical Society, 1971), 36 Google Scholar, Rabbi Philip S. Bernstein notes that the Jewish Welfare Board's Committee on Army and Navy Religious Activities protested the inclusion of the sentence “Jews are the Synagogue of Satan” in the Catholic version of the New Testament distributed to soldiers.

14. Dinnerstein, Leonard, Antisemitism in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 128-49, Flanagan reference on 136.Google Scholar

15. Goldman, Alex J., Giants of Faith: Great American Rabbis (New York: Citadel Press, 1964), 312-29Google Scholar, has a Standard account of Rabbi Alexander D. Goode, the Jewish chaplain. Goode was a champion of brotherhood, eager to serve in the military In January 1941, the navy rejected his application to serve as chaplain. After Pearl Harbor, the army accepted him. Bernstein, , Rabbis at War, 9–10 Google Scholar, notes that navy physical requirements were more demanding than the army's and that the navy also insisted on personal interviews to weed out “subversive elements.” As a result, the navy rejected some outstanding rabbis who had been active in liberal causes.

16. Fredman, J. George and Falk, Louis A., “Foreword,” in Jews in American Wars (New York: Jewish War Veterans of the United States, 1942)Google Scholar, n.p.; see full-page advertisement in the Jewish Forum, January 1944, 23, emphasis in the original.

17. Asch, Sholem, One Destiny: An Epistle to the Christians, trans. Hindus, Milton (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1945), 70, 83.Google Scholar

In a review in Commentary, Theodore H. Gaster wrote: “In all of this Mr. Asch is, of course, merely echoing a philosophy which has, unhappily, gained an all too wide currency through the misguided, irrational and irresponsible zeal of interfaith partisans. Going to any length to promote concord between Christians and Jews—and that as a defense mechanism against anti-Semitism rather than as an urgent and inevitable expression of faith—exponents of interfaith amity have been perfectly willing to bolster their cause by the fiction of an ill-defined and actually non-existent ‘Judeo-Christian civilization,” Gaster, Theodore H., “A Judeo-Christian Civilization?” Commentary? March l946, 91.Google Scholar

18. Kraut, “A Wary Collaboration,” 204-6. Kraut characterizes the 1933 cross-country tour of the Reverend Everett R. Clinchy, Father John Ross, and Rabbi Morris Lazaron as “revolutionary” (217). Lazaron and Clinchy both served as chaplains in World War I, which suggests an interesting connection between the two wars. The NCCJ began as the National Conference of Jews and Christians and changed its name in 1938-39 (196).

19. “Anti-Hate Campaign Taken to War Plants,” New York Post, December 31, 1943.

20. See Honeywell, Roy J., Chaplains of the United States Army (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Chaplains, Department of the Army, 1958), 222, 227.Google Scholar

21. Of the 311 Jewish chaplains commissioned, slightly less than half were Reform, around 30 percent were Conservative, and a quarter were Orthodox. The number of Jewish chaplains in the army was established by the War Department at 2 percent of the total Chaplain Corps based on the number of Jews in the army in 1928. It did not accurately represent the needs of those serving in World War II. By January 1945, the quota was raised to 3 percent to reflect the larger number of Jews in the army; in May 1945, it became 3.7 percent. See Grobman, Alex, Rekindling the Flame: American Jewish Chaplains and the Survivors of Enropean Jewry, 1944-1948 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993), 9.Google Scholar

22. Goldman, Chaplain Meyer J., “War Experiences and Post-War Equality (A Symposium),” Jewish Forum, January 1944, 3.Google Scholar

23. Honeywell, , Chaplains of the United States Army, 247-48.Google Scholar Perhaps the deaths of the four chaplains influenced this decision.

24. Goldman, “War Experiences and Post-War Equality,” 3.

25. The Jewish Welfare Board and chaplains urged Jews to do this as an interfaith gesture of goodwill. See Bernstein, , Rabbis at War, 37.Google Scholar

26. Solly Landau, essay number 1 in YIVO Essay Contest on the topic “My Experiences and Observations as a Jew and a soldier in World War II,” p. 6; Louis A. Gruhin to Sophie Gruhin, Fort Dix, N.J., Sunday, December 28, 1941, collection of Peter Schweitzer, New York; Sidler quoted in Fredman and Falk, Jews in American Wars, 113.

27. Zirul, Arthur, “Silent Night?” International Jewish Monthly December 1991, 14.Google Scholar

28. Jacobs, David J., “Seder at Sea,” International Jewish Monthly, December 1991, 40.Google Scholar

29. See the report of a veteran-chaplain Conference in the Reconstructionist, April 5, 1946, 9-31.

30. Ribalow, Harold U., “The Failure of Jewish Chaplaincy,” Jewish Frontier, June 1946, 10, 12.Google Scholar

31. Gersh, Harry, “Chaplains on Land and Sea: A One-Man Survey,” Commentary, August 1948, 172-73.Google Scholar

32. Adler, Morris, “The Chaplain and the Rabbi,” Reconstructionist, April 6, 1945, 10.Google Scholar

33. Louis A. Gruhin to Sophie Gruhin, Camp Claiborne, Louisiana, February 9, 1942, collection of Peter Schweitzer. Gruhin also observed his father's yarzeit and was careful to report how he observed it. In this case, he was able to get a minyan together three times during the week because there was another soldier who also had a yarzeit to observe.

34. Artie Kolin, interview with author, July 23, 1995.

35. Crosby, Donald F., Battlefield Chaplains: Catholic Priests in World War II (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 225.Google Scholar

36. Speech of Roland B. Gittelsohn on Iwo Jima at the dedication of the Fifth Marine Division Cemetery in “Chaplain Gittelsohn on Iwo Jima: Kappa Frater Delivers Memorial Address,” Deltan of Phi Sigma Delta, May 1945, 3.

37. Gittelsohn, Roland B., “Brothers All?” Reconstructionist, February 7, 1947, 11–12.Google Scholar

38. Howe, Irving and Libo, Kenneth, World of Our Fathers (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1976), 306-7.Google Scholar

39. Conversation with Rabbi David Lapp, director, Commission on Jewish Chaplaincy, National Jewish Welfare Board, June 11, 1986, in “Identifying Ourselves: The Historical Consciousness of American Jews,” by Arthur A. Goren, paper presented at the American Jewish Historical Society annual meeting, 1986, 4, 23, n. 6.

40. Matthew Jacobson, “Jewishness, Justice, and Difference in Laura Z. Hobson's A Gentleman's Agreement,” paper delivered at the American Studies Association annual meeting, November 10, 1995.

41. The concept of “identity” did not really enter American discourse until after the war, introduced by Erik Erikson's Childhood and Society (New York: Norton, 1950), 244-83, as Philip Gleason has shown in “Americans All: World War II and the Shaping of American Identity,” Review of Politics 43, no. 4 (October 1981): 485-518, Erikson reference on 509.

42. The role of the American military in putting into Operation the Judeo-Christian tradition probably helps to account for Eisenhower's famous remark to Marshai Zhukov: “In other words, our Government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith and I don't care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept, but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.” See Henry, Patrick, “‘And I Don't Care What It Is’: The Tradition-History of a Civil Religion Proof-Text,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 49, no. 1 (March 1981): 41.Google Scholar

43. Bernstein, , Rabbis at War, 18.Google Scholar

44. The attacks on the Judeo-Christian tradition in the 1950's, most notably by Herberg, Will in Protestant, Catholic, Jew: An Essay in American Religious Sociology (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1956)Google Scholar and Cohen, Arthur A. in The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition (New York: Harper and Row, 1957)Google Scholar, focused on theological issues, not social ones.