While most Americans found Hitler’s totalitarian ways distasteful, they could not yet see any compelling reason to consider going to war against Nazi Germany, which seemed to be just one in a vast and ever-increasing array of unsavory regimes. Gallup polls during 1940-41 found only about one-tenth of Americans willing to go to war for any other reason than to fend off an invasion of the United States itself.Sound familiar?
. . . the American Jewish Committee, declined to sponsor a U.S. speaking tour by Winston Churchill in 1937, fearing that its involvement might be seen as evidence of a plot “to involve the United States in the European mess,” as one AJCommittee official put it. Palestine Labor Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion, visiting the United States in 1940, was disappointed to find Jewish leaders reluctant to speak out. One told him: “If I stand up and demand American aid for Britain, people will say after the war that the dirty Jews got us into it, that it was a Jewish war, that it was for their sakes that our sons died in battle.”
But the position of Hollywood was decidedly different.
. . . those favoring action against Hitler established the Fight for Freedom committee, which soon attracted the support of numerous prominent Americans. Fight for Freedom’s supporters included many Hollywood figures, such as Tallulah Bankhead, Helen Hayes, Burgess Meredith, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and such prominent Jews as Irving Berlin, Ethel Merman, Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Oscar Hammerstein, George Jessel and Ben Hecht.And back to the present, where one of my favorite actors, John Cusack, follows in the hallowed tradition of Sean Penn and Viggo Mortensen and makes an ahistorical ass of himself.
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