AMERICAN MACCABEE

An account of Theodore Roosevelt’s often contradictory responses to diplomatic and domestic Jewish affairs.

Porwancher, professor of history at Arizona State University, explores Roosevelt’s largely overlooked commitment to supporting international Jewish causes and promoting Jewish equality in the United States. As a New York City police commissioner, Roosevelt valued representation and actively recruited Jewish officers from the city’s East Side. As president, he relied on an informal “Jewish kitchen cabinet” of advisers and ultimately named one of them, Oscar Straus, to his cabinet, making him the first Jew in U.S. history to hold a cabinet position. During his time in office, Roosevelt publicly condemned a series of horrific Russian pogroms—mob attacks on Russian Jews—at a time when doing so pushed the bounds of diplomatic protocols and opened him up to charges of hypocrisy for failing to address widespread lynching of Black people in the U.S. And yet this same Roosevelt engaged in antisemitic tropes and embraced the idea of a “melting pot” that urged immigrants to assimilate. Ultimately, Porwancher argues, “Roosevelt personified the contradictions and complexities of the nation that elected him.” Porwancher, author of The Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton (2021), does not write to either “burnish” or “tarnish” Roosevelt’s reputation: “The sole ambition of this study is to reckon with the historical record in its full complexity.” Indeed, Porwancher thoughtfully interrogates his sources for examples of Roosevelt’s conflicting attitudes and actions toward various races, religions, and nationalities, but readers would benefit from a little more context. What were the limits of Roosevelt’s desire for representation on the New York City police force? Were Black people included in his vision? These questions remain unanswered. Nevertheless, Porwancher provides a compelling history of American Jews, immigration, citizenship, and world politics at the dawn of a new century.

Ideal for readers interested in the politics of early-20th-century America.