“Give Me the Names of All Your Jews”
My dad, Harry Spector, spent his World War II years as an ordnance engineer at the Aberdeen Proving Ground, “a premier U.S. Army facility in Maryland focused on research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE) of weapons, sensors, and combat equipment.” He repeatedly asked to be released to active duty, but APG repeatedly requested occupational deferment to keep him at his job. His brother, my Uncle Irving, worked there as an engineering aide in training after he was honorably discharged from the Navy. While at APG, Irving received “a certificate and award of merit with maximum monetary award for development of a signal eliminator for radiosonic equipment which improved data used in computation of range tables for artillery and bombing” (The Baltimore Sun, July 20, 1946, accessed through newspaper.com).
In June 1946, Dad and Uncle Irving and three other APG workers – Abraham Kotelchuk, Phil Weiss and Rheabel Mendelsohn – were fired “in the interest of national security.” These were the early years of the Second Red Scare, which came to be known as the McCarthy Era. Weiss and Kotelchuck were physicists whose expertise and contributions prompted APG to repeatedly request occupational deferments. Mendelsohn was a statistician.
Dad was president of Local 250 of the United Public Workers of America, Uncle Irving chaired the grievance committee, Weiss chaired the organizing committee, Mendelsohn was the secretary of the local, and Kotelchuck chaired the education and legislative committee. (Yes, I, too, noticed the division of labor between the men and the woman.)
In March 1946, three months before the firings, the UPWA had asked APG for an 18.5-cent per hour raise. The UPWA saw the firing of the local’s leadership as part of an effort to weaken the union. They were right. Among the principal targets of the Second Red Scare were radical unions. The country was transitioning from a war economy and unions, which for the most part had pledged not to strike during the war, were demanding a bigger share of the pie. The 1947 Taft-Hartley Act required union leaders to sign loyalty (“I am not a communist”) oaths. The anticommunist crusade successfully purged many unions, including the UPWA, of their progressive and left leadership.
Dad and the other four union leaders were Jewish. Their victimization by the government seems less like a coincidence and more like antisemitism. Not the “let’s get these Jew commie bastards!” approach; more the “let’s get these commie bastards (and it would be a bonus if they were Jewish)!” Maybe it was too soon after the liberation of the Nazi death camps for foam-at-the-mouth antisemitism from government types. But I assume that, while it was compiling lists of disloyal undesirables, the government knew which ones were the Jews.
I.F. Stone, one of the premiere muckracking journalists from the 1940s through the 1980s, wrote the following in the January 27, 1947 issue of PM Daily in an article entitled “Portrait of an Army Witch Hunt”:
One aspect of this case which may or may not be indicative of how the military intelligence mind works is this: There were 12 members of the executive board of the Aberdeen local union. Five were Jews, and these are the five who were fired. None of the non-Jews was questioned or dismissed.
Two well-known witchhunts of the era — the Hollywood Ten in the late 1940s and the Rosenberg case in the early 1950s — also involved Jewish victims. Ten Hollywood directors, producers, and writers were convicted and jailed for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee. Nine of them were Jewish. The Rosenberg case comprised Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (defendants), Mort Sobell (co-defendant), and David and Ruth Greenglass (prosecution witnesses). All Jewish. The Rosenbergs were found guilty of conspiracy to give the Soviet Union information about the U.S. atomic bomb and the Eisenhower administration killed them on June 19, 1953.
As far as I know (and that might not be saying much), in none of these three events did the victims or their defenders charge the government with singling them out as Jews.
We have in our family archive what appears to be a presentation Dad wrote in the Fall of 1948, more than two years after the firings. We haven’t determined whether he made the presentation, which is addressed to “Mr. Chairman, and Ladies & Gentlemen,” or whom he was addressing.
We know he wrote it in 1948 because he writes about the organized anticommunist campaign that drove him from his job as a high school physics teacher that year, and because he refers to the campaign of Henry Wallace, the presidential candidate of the Progressive Party in the 1948 elections. He wrote,
I.F. Stone made a further point in his article. Although we had not charged anti-Semitism against the War Department, Mr. Stone pointed to the fascist thinking in the Department when he revealed that the five who were dismissed were the only Jewish members of a 12 man union executive committee.
Why didn’t the “Aberdeen Five,” the UPWA, the Communist Party of Maryland, and others who spoke up in defense, make that charge? Was it because they wanted to emphasize the need for collective resistance to the Red Scare? I don’t know.
In “Remembering the Rosenbergs,” I discuss how major Jewish organizations hung the Rosenbergs out to dry, to make clear to the state where their allegiance lay. And a poll taken by the American Jewish Committee showed just how virulent antisemitism was in 1950.
Trump to UPenn: “Give me the names of all your Jews.”
A federal judge ruled recently that the University of Pennsylvania “must turn over lists of Jewish employees as part of the Trump administration’s investigation into antisemitism on its campus.”
In spite of opposition from Jewish faculty and staff and the campus Chabad and Hillel chapters, U.S. District Judge Gerald J. Pappert, wrote
Penn and other groups and associations the Court permitted to intervene significantly raised the dispute’s temperature by impliedly and even expressly comparing the [government’s] efforts to protect Jewish employees from antisemitism to the Holocaust and the Nazis’ compilation of lists of Jews… Such allegations are unfortunate and inappropriate.
Though ineptly worded, the [government’s] request had an understandable purpose — to obtain in a narrowly tailored way, as opposed to seeking information on all university employees, information on individuals in Penn’s Jewish community who could have experienced or witnessed antisemitism in the workplace.
Is this a prelude to asking for the names of all Black people on campus who could have experienced or witnessed racism in the workplace? Or all women, queers, or trans people? Probably not – that would be woke DEI and critical race theory stuff. How about the names of all workers on campus who could have experienced or witnessed inadequate wages, sexual harassment, or lack of health care?
Of course not. The state uses “the Jews” for its own interests. It projects a facade of philosemitism as cover for its assault on democracy at home and to justify its complicity in genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon.
And by treating Jews as worthy of special treatment, the state leaves them exposed: it forces universities to cut DEI programs while requiring them to fund “anti-antisemitism” programs; it criminalizes pro-Palestine political expression while boosting pro-Israel political expression; and it has a U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, but not, for example, for Islamophobia.
Antisemitism can’t be fought in alliance with a state that relies on antisemitism to protect its rule, any more than anti-Black racism can be fought in alliance with a state that is based on the superexploitation of Black labor and that produced slavery, apartheid, and entrenched segregation. Antisemitism has to be fought from below and against the state, in alliance with those struggling against all forms of racism and discrimination.
The frantic, fevered response to the growth of the Palestine solidarity movement, especially since October 7, resembles a Third Red Scare. The new tripwire is “Are you now or have you ever been critical of Israel?” The Zionist infrastructure – an interwoven fabric of legacy organizations, think tanks, the Jewish 1%, tax-exempt “charities,” and NGOs tied to the Israeli state – looks through every social-media post, behind every academic door, and inside every union, cultural institution, and left organization, for any criticism of the Israeli state, and turns its findings over to university administrators, corporate media, politicians and elected officials for economic retaliation, political persecution, deportation, incarceration, and physical intimidation.
This Zionist infrastructure is giving the state lists of names of people to persecute while the state is demanding lists of Jews “to protect” — the same state that will fight to the last Israeli Jew and Palestinian Arab to protect its geostrategic interests in the Middle East. And in a twist of base irony, many of the people on the persecution lists are non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews.
Why would the state protect Jews (the default assumption here is “white Jews”) if it doesn’t protect Black people (some of whom are Jews) or working people (some of whom are Jews) or trans people (some of whom are Jews)?
It won’t. I know this to be true because the state went after Dad and Uncle Irving.
[Danny Spector is a red diaper baby, a retired hydrogeologist, and a grandfather to four boys and a girl. He writes a newsletter on Substack (thoughtsletter.substack.com).]