During the occasional tumult that accompanied adjustment to a new order beginning with Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1933, not a few opponents of his administration over the following years charged that his New Deal recovery program of the 1930s was a “Jew Deal” (or the related charge that it was a way for Jews to force communism on America).[1] This three-part series will address the accuracy of this charge by looking at the activities of Jews vis-à-vis the New Deal.

The New Deal, FDR’s somewhat revolutionary, somewhat reformist program to pull America out of the Great Depression and institute progressive change, dealt with a vast firmament of issues that affected the nation and brought changes to the state and its relationship to American society. It is much too complex a phenomenon to discuss in its entirety or to examine any part of it in great detail, so I have chosen some major features and programs from it to the exclusion of more minor ones, a strategy that makes no great sacrifices. I will not discuss Jewish involvement in affairs outside of the New Deal, most notably non-monetary international issues including World War II, Hitler’s Germany, or the Holocaust.

I will also limit myself to the New Deal through 1936, here organized into two periods, what scholars identify as the First and Second New Deals. The First New Deal covers 1933–1934 and the Second New Deal covers the period between 1935–1936.[2] After 1936, the New Deal underwent an eclipse as Roosevelt passed fewer bills against powerful business headwinds that began in late 1935 after a legislative flurry that summer. In 1937, Roosevelt experienced a political setback with his failed “court-packing plan” and later that year a major recession hit the country, while conservative opponents of the New Deal won the midterms of 1938.[3] Following 1938, the administration’s attention was rapidly moving to Europe. Therefore, the most significant period for the New Deal was overwhelmingly in Roosevelt’s first term.

In part one, I will talk briefly about Franklin D. Roosevelt and his relationship to the Jews, the Democratic Party, and the 1932 election, along with a look at two First New Deal agencies, with some accompanying sideline discussions including the nature of managerial and corporate changes. It will take an extended look at Jerome Frank, Bernard Baruch, and Gerard Swope. Part two will examine the relationship between Jews, banking and money during the New Deal with an extended look at Henry Morgenthau Jr. (with some info on others as well, including Jimmy Warburg, Louis Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter). Part three will look at the Second New Deal period (1935–36) including agencies and programs, a profile of the Jews who entered public service (with a focus on lawyers), the question of socialism and labor, more information on Brandeis and Frankfurter, and conclusions regarding the reputed “Jew Deal.”

THE MANAGERIAL SYSTEM AND THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BY 1932

Roosevelt’s triumph in 1932 saw the Democratic left come to power with the full force of its epoch-creating liberal managerial ideas — central planning, the public good over private interest (and the blurring of these distinctions), forms of collectivism over individualism, the rights of labor, from an “age of production … to an age of redistribution,”[4] etc. In meeting the exigencies of the Great Depression, in the view of many conservatives, the left dealt brusquely with the once revered monuments of the country enshrined in the Constitution,[5] such as the American mythos of laissez-faire and small government, the sanctity of private property rights and the natural rights of man.[6]

This new great river flowed from many tributaries and White male gentiles were overwhelmingly the font for these intellectual currents. For instance, there had been anticipatory ideas about the expansion of governmental administration in the nineteenth-century progressive political theories of the administrative pioneers Woodrow Wilson and Frank Goodnow.[7] The progressive intellectuals John Dewey, Charles Beard and Thorstein Veblen sought reconstructive change through their contributions to the new schools within psychology, history, and economics, and had called for new institutional arrangements in the construction of a democratic order.[8] They would count as their disciples many future New Dealers, like Frances Perkins and Rexford Tugwell. The progressive and sociological jurisprudence of men like Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., Louis Brandeis, and Roscoe Pound would become important for the New Deal and the liberal democratic state with their pronouncements that the study and adjudication of the law ought to incorporate social and pragmatic considerations that could be used to elevate the societal good.[9]

There had been a precedent before FDR’s state expansion that served as a forerunner to New Deal innovations. Upon entering World War I in 1917, President Wilson’s administration oversaw the greatest effort at state-run collectivism the nation had ever witnessed, involving the creation of numerous emergency government agencies.[10] As Sam Francis says about this, “The increase in the size of the state consisted not only in larger budgets and more personnel but also in the proliferation of its functions in regulating the economy, supervising and engineering social institutions, and preparing for and conducting the total mobilization of natural, human, social, economic, psychological, and technological resources for mass warfare [i.e., World War I, briefly discussed below],” although the wartime agencies were rolled back after the emergency was over. “These new functions were highly technical in nature and required the application of the physical and social sciences, the techniques of administration, and the skills of mass communication to the goal of what McNeill has called ‘human engineering’,” that this was first pioneered beginning in the late nineteenth century across the West.[11]

The wartime measures under Wilson and the New Deal under Roosevelt meant that this private-public fusion of the economy and state took place under the stewardship of the Democratic Party. For generations, the party had had almost as many partisan perspectives as national regions eager to move it in one direction or another during its bid to become nationally competitive again since the end of the Jacksonian era. By 1932, what Joseph Huthmacher called the “urban industrial Newer American” population (i.e., urban immigrants), was the “backbone of the New Deal voting coalition.”[12] Once elected in 1932 with a mandate to end the Depression, FDR had the responsibility of confecting a workable amalgamation of ideas for the New Deal’s agenda during the managerial state’s birth. To rule over a heterogenous democracy required being less dogmatic and more practical. Accordingly, Roosevelt himself has been characterized by scholars across his career as either having no real ideological commitments and as being a “pragmatic opportunist.”[13]

During the 1932 presidential campaign, he wafted from one end of the Democratic political spectrum to another. He both endorsed the need for administrative planning in one speech and in another pleased the conservative Democrats with calls for balanced budgets. Overall, Paul Moreno says that FDR “followed Wilson in conducting an ambivalent, often apparently conservative campaign to win the nomination and election, and then becoming more thoroughly progressive to win re-election.”[14] That spectrum was no less important during the days of the new administration. Conservatives with “Bourbon” democratic leanings, trust-busting and inflationist agrarian radicals, urban Jeffersonian opponents of the behemoth Gilded Age industrial corporations, and Hamiltonian large government progressive planners all jostled for Roosevelt’s attention.

Schlesinger uses three categories for the Party by 1932. The conservative Democrats, believers in laissez-faire economics, sound money (i.e., the gold standard), low-tariffs, a balanced budget, and states’ rights, were represented by figures like Al Smith and Maryland governor Albert Ritchie, and in FDR’s presidential administration by budget director Lewis Douglas and southern congressman Cordell Hull. The legacy of the older progressive tradition, having its roots in the agrarian “Populist” movement (associated with William Jennings Bryan) had divided into a western and southern camp of populists (e.g., Robert La Follette, Huey Long) and an eastern-intellectual camp (Louis Brandeis). Finally, the newer progressivism of the left Democrat administrative government planners — the authors of the administrative state — was a recruited Columbia University professoriate that represented the core of the first “Brain Trust” of Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell, and Adolf Berle, who, “accepting the drive of modern technology toward [corporate] bigness, [sought] to reorganize the chaotic business order into a system of national integration”; that is, unlike many of the older progressives who wanted to apply anti-trust laws to restore a nineteenth-century economic order, they accepted the inevitability of large corporate business entities but looked for balance through an expanded centralized regulatory state.[15]

This pluralism would be tested under the constraint of shifting circumstance and expediency. For Roosevelt, the more leftist experiments were in keeping with his progressive record as governor (1929–1932), when he advocated planning schemes including recommending moving populations out of the city into the countryside to correct imbalances.[16] FDR had been a Democratic Party booster during the Republican business decade of the 1920s; he had often been vocal about his convictions that his party was the party of progress.[17] As president during the Great Depression, he sanctioned many new functions of government.

This Brain Trust circle would change over the years. The Columbia circle of Tugwell-Berle-Moley, originally recommended by Jewish advisor Sam Rosenman, another Brain Truster who first proposed assembling a group of academic advisors,[18] did not remain a team after the election.  Economist Raymond Moley would still be an insider. He moved to the State Department,[19] as would fellow economist Rexford Tugwell, who was sent to the Department of Agriculture to help oversee the planning schemes in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration where he would attempt to boost farm prices. Harvard Law School professor Felix Frankfurter was influential from the opening of the administration and would exert influence from behind the scenes using his protégés, a similar strategy to that of Bernard Baruch as we’ll see.[20]

Frankfurter had been important since FDR’s inauguration, acting as a “one-man recruiting agency,” both recommending personnel when asked by New Deal leaders and recommending them on his own initiative, thus exerting his influence towards building the modern state.[21] In the middle of 1935, Frankfurter was at the White House more than at any other time and became part of FDR’s inner circle, despite having a teaching career. During this period, the press claimed Frankfurter was the principal advisor, pushing out Moley.[22] Over the years, Frankfurter and Brandeis also “stood out among [FDR’s] closest advisors on governmental policies.”[23]

In FDR and the Jews Breitman and Lichtman note that Roosevelt, first as governor and later as president, chose his advisers and staff according to “experience, brains, and liberal values.”[24] Roosevelt’s most “trusted advisor among the professional politicians” had been the lawyer and politician Edward J. Flynn.[25] Others include Louis Howe, Roosevelt’s long-time political operative who laid the groundwork for his election and without whom, “FDR might have faded from history at the age of 30.”[26] Another, James Farley, was commonly referred to as a political kingmaker, as he was responsible for Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency. The previously-mentioned aide Sam Rosenman was “the major figure in the executive chamber” in Albany when Roosevelt was New York governor;[27] he worked for Roosevelt’s presidential campaign of 1932 and would be a close adviser of FDR for the rest of his life.[28] Rosenman was responsible for using the phrase “New Deal” for a 1932 Roosevelt speech. The phrase was borrowed from the progressive, technocratic authoritarian writer Stuart Chase in an article for the New Republic.[29] Like others profiled here, Rosenman was a strongly identified Jew: “By the mid-1930s, Rosenman had emerged as a leading spokesman for the New York Jewish community.”[30] 

FUNDING FOR FDR’S 1932 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN

The Democrats were assigned to oblivion after the collapse of progressivism and the left in 1919, leading to the Republican business-oriented rule of the 1920s.[31] After the 1928 presidential election that put Republican Herbert Hoover in office, the Democratic Party’s woes were complicated by the financial position of the National Committee, and two men, DNC chairman John Raskob (a Catholic like Al Smith who backed Smith in his loss to Hoover in the 1928 presidential election) and Bernard Baruch were benefactor millionaires who were determined to keep the party afloat despite its string of presidential losses since 1920. However, in doing so, they expected influence in the party. However, Schlesinger notes that Raskob, who was past head of Du Pont, found politics “difficult and unattractive” but that Baruch was “infinitely more skilled in political operations.”

In March 1931, Schlesinger lists three men as having donated the largest amount to Roosevelt’s presidential campaign, including Henry Morgenthau Sr. whose famous son would become the United States Secretary of the Treasury during most of the FDR administration.[32] Morgenthau, Jr.  would play a lead role in financing the New Deal. Herbert Lehman, who was a major Jewish Democrat in New York State and who was Roosevelt’s lieutenant governor and would follow Roosevelt as governor, instituting a “little New Deal” there, donated a smaller amount.[33]

During the campaign in the election year of 1932, Schlesinger also identifies numerous gentiles giving to Roosevelt’s campaign, including Raskob, industrialist William Hartman Woodin, newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, investor Joseph Kennedy, and Boston politician James Michael Curley, yet Bernard Baruch stood out as the largest donor.[34] In his decision to support Roosevelt for president, Baruch was influenced by Morgenthau Sr., who told Baruch in 1932 “That’s my candidate!”[35] During the nominating convention Al Smith refused to relinquish his votes to Roosevelt, deliberately stonewalling a unanimous nomination, which was ended only with the personal intervention of three Jews who pressured him over lunch: (the ubiquitous) Baruch, Herbert Bayard Swope, and Felix Frankfurter.”[36]

Breitman and Lichtman note that “Although Republicans collected a larger share of business dollars during FDR’s presidential campaigns, Jewish businessmen primarily supported Democrats,”[37] and that “shortly after his nomination, FDR selected Henry Morgenthau Sr. as vice chairman of his Executive Finance Committee. Six other New York Jews also served on the committee: Bernard Baruch, Herbert Bayard Swope, Jesse I. Straus, Sidney Weinberg, Walter Weinstein, and Laurence A. Steinhardt.”[38] Their job was to raise over a million dollars at a time when a million dollars was worth about 23 million in 2024 dollars.[39] When we talk about the National Recovery Administration (NRA), we’ll encounter Herbert Bayard Swope’s brother Gerard Swope, whose planning scheme had the backing of a critical portion of Wall St. interests to help FDR’s win the presidential election.[40]

Furthermore, Sidney Weinberg, who was a partner at Goldman Sachs, raised more money for Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign than anyone else on the Democratic National Campaign Finance Committee. From Wikipedia: “Since many on Wall Street had opposed Roosevelt in the 1932 presidential election, Weinberg stood out as a prime candidate for the new president’s liaison to Wall Street. Indeed, in 1933, Roosevelt assigned Weinberg the task of organizing a group of corporate executives — called the Business Advisory and Planning Council — to serve as a bridge between the government and the private sector during the economic upheaval of the New Deal. Weinberg handpicked executives with whom he wanted to develop business relationships, and deliberately invited no other investment bankers to join the Council, putting himself in the perfect position to network. Roosevelt admired Weinberg’s work greatly, nicknaming him “The Politician” and offering him numerous federal appointments, all of which Weinberg refused.”[41] 

ROOSEVELT AND THE JEWS

Roosevelt won by a landslide in 1932 carrying almost every state, beginning the New Deal Coalition where Jews played an important role.[42] The Jews certainly felt victorious from the Roosevelt triumph if historian Arthur Hertzberg’s statement that “the Jews loved Franklin Delano Roosevelt with singular and unparalleled passion” is an indication.[43] Roosevelt received 70 to 80% of the Jewish vote in 1932,[44] a figure that would grow to 90% in the 1936 election.[45]  Dinnerstein notes that many Jews were motivated to vote for Roosevelt because of similarities between Judaism and the values and aims of the New Deal, including the intellectuality of its policies along with the desire to help the marginal, and that Jewish upbringing prepared them for these roles.[46] “Jewish values.”

Roosevelt had more Jews around him than any previous president[47], which was consistent with his appointments as governor.[48] Dinnerstein mentions that “Roosevelt worked comfortably with Jews.”[49] Around 15% of his appointments were Jews, who “held middle-level positions in the economic agencies and departments of government.”[50] A source from 1942 wrote that, although “the number of Jews in [the entire] government didn’t exceed their percentage in the population [4 percent], “it is also my observation that men who are Jews occupy very influential positions.”[51] Hertzberg’s opinion is that Roosevelt was not influenced by Jews any more than anyone else. Roosevelt was known for being extremely guarded about what he was thinking underneath an oftentimes agreeable exterior,[52] and that he played advisors off against each other.[53] Many Jews, nonetheless, believed that Roosevelt had a “special love” for them — their protector and “benevolent king”[54] in a world in which Hitler had just come to power, and where Roosevelt was the only world leader who wasn’t hostile to Jewish interests[55] — a role Roosevelt loved to play.[56] He had been the first major presidential candidate in American history to condemn anti-Jewish attitudes.[57] This was indeed a breakthrough for the Jews, as a 1938 poll taken showed a substantial number of Americans felt Hitler’s anti-Semitism was the Jews’ fault. American Jewish leaders even believed it a possibility that given a choice between European Jews and Nazism, the American public might not choose the Jews.[58]

Roosevelt of course came from American royalty, a class that generally not only paid attention to breeding and caste but was one which existed in the heyday of racial thinking.[59] Roosevelt himself claimed his “membership in the ‘Aryan races’,”[60] and during a 1912 speech in Troy, New York, he claimed that civilized progress and the struggle for freedom was associated with them.[61] So, what was the source of this apparent “special love” for Jews? Roosevelt’s father James had had business dealings with Jews. Breitman and Lichtman report that he “counseled his son about the immorality of anti-Semitism and his contempt for it.” His mother Sara, despite having an “acute sense of class,” made friends with Jews and contributed to Jewish causes.[62] As a result, his father, like his son, maintained amicable business relationships with Jews during his adult life.[63]

Baltzell is important in providing the concept of the “affirming aristocrat,” an establishment figure who rejected the exclusive class caste system they were born into in favor of supporting the integration of minorities into society and into the elite.[64] With his election, Franklin Roosevelt was the man who led Jews, both the Jews who originated in Germany and the descendants of the Eastern European Jews, into the functional elite. Also, the Roosevelts, a Dutch colonial “Knickerbocker” family from New York, eschewed the Upper Ten Society in their rejection of “ostentation and frivolity.”[65] It’s then no wonder Roosevelt was called a “traitor to his class.”[66]

It’s worth noting the role of Caesarism within the managerial state, with the political Caesar who, according to Max Weber, “often grows out of democracy.” Such a leader bases “his power on his personal competence and charismatic appeal, uses the mass population to undermine the institutions, traditions, and power of an existing elite, and elevates a section of his mass following to the position of a new elite.”[67] To this, we can add the following by Kevin MacDonald, that Jewish “elites are unlikely to identify with the interests of the society as a whole, and they are relatively eager to agree on arrangements that are personally beneficial, even if they negatively impact other groups of the society.”[68] Thus, it’s worth exploring to what extent Roosevelt played a key role in bringing about a miracle for the Jews in America by exploiting a civilizational crisis, defying his genteel bourgeois roots, and gaining votes from and rewarding this “elevated section”.

While the German Jews had been here since the mid-nineteenth century, the immigrants from Eastern Europe had mainly come during the post-1880 immigration flood. They were encouraged to immigrate to meet the needs of rapid industrialization by the nouveau riche captains of postbellum industry, but this immediately led to exclusionary behavior that began in the 1880s — which was manifested in the appearance of the patrician summer resorts, country clubs (the first in Brookline, MA in 1882), and the sudden preoccupation with one’s roots, in such organizations as the Sons of the Revolution, founded in 1883.[69] After this, the newcomers from Eastern Europe would be battling the patricians to make room in the establishment, and in a stunning reversal of fortune, by the end of the 1960s, those old-line patricians would be made déclassé. This transition would take place less than a century after the post-1880 immigration wave.

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[1] Brad Snyder, Democratic Justice: Felix Frankfurter, the Supreme Court, and the Making of the Liberal Establishment (W.W. Norton and Company, 2022), 237. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, 1960), 27. Leonard Dinnerstein, “Jews and the New Deal,” American Jewish History 72, no. 4 (June, 1983): 461, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23882507. Myron Scholnick, The New Deal and Anti-Semitism in America (Garland Publishing, 1990), 62;73.

[2] “New Deal,” Wikipedia, last modified October 25, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Summary_of_First_and_Second_New_Deal_programs.

[3] William Dudley, The Great Depression, Opposing Viewpoints (Greenhaven Press, 1994), 205. See also, “Recession of 1937-1938,” Wikipedia, last modified June 6, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recession_of_1937-1938.

[4] Paul D. Moreno, The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 225.

[5] E. Digby Baltzell, The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America (Random House, 1964), 165.

[6] Ronald J. Pestritto, American Transformed (Encounter Books, 2021), 71. See also William Leuchtenburg quote in Sam Francis, Leviathan & Its Enemies (Washington Summit Publishers, 2016), 222.

[7] Pestritto, 200-219.

[8] Baltzell, 162. See also Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order (Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, 1957), chapter 17.

[9] Stephen M. Feldman, American Legal Thought from Premodernism to Postmodernism (Oxford University Press, 2000), 108-109. See also Moreno, 54-58.

[10] Hugh Rockoff, “U.S. Economy in World War I,” Economic History Association, accessed October 27, 2024, https://eh.net/encyclopedia/u-s-economy-in-world-war-i/. See section titled ‘The Government’s Role in Mobilization’.

[11] Francis, 44.

[12] J. Joseph Huthmacher, “Senator Robert F. Wagner and the Rise of Urban Liberalism,” American Jewish Historical Quarterly 58, no. 3 (March, 1969): 343. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23876008.

[13] Moreno says this works because progressive liberalism is based on pragmatism anyhow (i.e., based on rational, scientific decision-making and is supposedly or ideally post-ideological). In Moreno, 220. Baltzell says that the ideas of John Dewey, who “socialized William James’s [Pragmatist] ideas,” were perfect for the “experimental, rather than dogmatic, political reformers who filtered into the Democratic Party under the leadership of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt.” In Baltzell, 167.
This pragmatic approach was found within individual departments. Agricultural expert M.L. Wilson insisted in 1932 that a variety of approaches be included in the Ag. Bill (and not just his own domestic allotment program) and that the secretary should decide on an ad hoc basis which to use. The resulting bill (Ezekiel, Wallace, Lee, and Frank) was probably the most inventive bill in U.S. history. In Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston Houghton Mifflin Company Boston, 1959), 38-39.

[14] Moreno, 220.

[15] Schlesinger, TCOTND, 18-20 and TCOTOO, 416-20. For general info on the planners’ philosophy, see TCOTOO, 190-198. Moley, Tugwell, and Berle were gentiles. Berle was a Bostonian former student of Frankfurter who had supported Brandeis against the Brahmin establishment in 1916. In Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: four centuries of an uneasy encounter: a history (Simon and Schuster, 1989), 221.

[16] Moreno, 222.

[17] Schlesinger, TCOTOO, 103.

[18] Ibid., 398-399.

[19] Ibid., 473.

[20] Ibid., 451-452.

[21] Snyder, 224. See also Leonard Dinnerstein, Antisemitism in America (Oxford University Press, 1994), 108.

[22] Snyder, 251-252.

[23] Dinnerstein, 108.

[24] Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, FDR and the Jews (Harvard University Press, 2013), 34.

[25] Schlesinger, 278.

[26] Breitman and Lichtman, 13.

[27] Dinnerstein, J&TND, 471. Dinnerstein in his article also mentions that, among his advisors, Rosenman was the closest to Roosevelt over the longest period. Dinnerstein, 470-1.

[28] Breitman and Lichtman, 32.

[29] Schlesinger, TCOTOO, 403. Chase was influenced by anti-capitalist economist Thorstein Veblen, and The New Republic was started in 1914 by Herbert Croly, Walter Weyl (Jewish), and Walter Lippmann (Jewish).

[30] “Samuel Rosenman,” Wikipedia, last modified October 17, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Rosenman.

[31] Schlesinger, 43-45.

[32] Ibid., 280.

[33] Ibid., 273-274. The “little New Deal” is mentioned in Daniel Ernst, Tocqueville’s Nightmare (Oxford University Press, 2014), 80.

[34] Schlesinger, 421.

[35] Ibid., 288.

[36] Leonard Baker, Brandeis and Frankfurter (Harper & Row, 1984), 277.

[37] Jews had supported Hoover as well, with Sutton listing Jews as contributing more than half the funds to the RNC among contributors giving more than $25,000 in 1928, including the Guggenheims, Eugene Meyer, Otto Kahn, and Mortimer Schiff. In Sutton, 315. Jews had contributed heavily to many prior campaigns, including Wilson in 1912: “Cooper remarks that his “big contributors” included the likes of “Henry Morgenthau, Jacob Schiff, and Samuel Untermyer, as well as a newcomer to their ranks, Bernard Baruch.” In Thomas Dalton, “The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 1,” CODOH, July, 2013, https://codoh.com/library/document/the-jewish-hand-in-the-world-wars-part-1/.

[38] Breitman and Lichtman, 39.

[39] “Seven Jews on Finance Committee of Democrats,” Jewish Daily Bulletin, September 18, 1932, 2, http://pdfs.jta.org/1932/1932-09-18_2357.pdf. Also, “A political ally of New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, in March 1931, Jesse Straus funded a poll of the delegates to the 1928 Democratic Convention to assess Roosevelt’s chances in the race for the 1932 Democratic presidential nomination.” In “Jessie I. Strauss,” Wikipedia, last modified October 24, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_I._Straus.

[40] The election claim is according to scholar Anthony Sutton.

[41] “Sidney Weinberg,” Wikipedia, last modified August 26, 2024, accessed October 27, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidney_Weinberg.

[42] “New Deal Coalition,” Wikipedia, last modified October 25, 2024, last modified, accessed October 27, 2024, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal_coalition.

[43] Hertzberg, 282.

[44] Breitman and Lichtman, 43.

[45] Hertzberg, 285. Many of the socialist readers of the Communist Morgen Freiheit gave Roosevelt their vote over Earl Browder.

[46] Dinnerstein article, 462-463.

[47] Hertzberg, 282.

[48] Breitman and Lichtman, 65.

[49] Dinnerstein, 108.

[50] Breitman and Lichtman, 65.

[51] W.M. Kiplinger, “The Facts about Jews in Washington,” Reader’s Digest, September 1942, 2.

[52] Breitman and Lichtman, 9.

[53] Hertzberg, 282.

[54] Ibid., 284.

[55] Dinnerstein, 104.

[56] Hertzberg, 286.

[57] Breitman and Lichtman, 42.

[58] Hertzberg, 289.

[59] Kevin B. MacDonald, “Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America,” The Occidental Quarterly 15, no. 4 (Winter 2015—2016): 22, http://www.kevinmacdonald.net/Kaufmann-final.pdf.

[60] Breitman and Lichtman, 8.

[61] Ibid., 13.

[62] Ibid., 8. In the same section Breitman and Lichtman also say that FDR’s parents inculcated compassion for the less fortunate. In Ibid., 9. Also, sociologist E. Digby Baltzell notes that class can trump ethno-religious identity. In Baltzell, 63. At least this can be said about White Europeans.

[63] Breitman and Lichtman, 8-9.

[64] Baltzell, 28. For speculation on Roosevelt’s reputed Jewish ancestry: Thomas Dalton, “The Jewish Hand in the World Wars, Part 2,” July 1, 2013, https://codoh.com/library/document/the-jewish-hand-in-the-world-wars-part-2/en/.

[65] Michael McGerr, A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870-1920 (Oxford University Press, 2005), 36.

[66] Consider the book title of: H.W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt (Knopf Doubleday, 2008), https://books.google.com/books?id=bmKMa_y3hh0C.

[67] Francis, 55. Francis also says that managerial elements encourage the extension of the franchise to groups that the bourgeois elite cannot discipline. In Ibid., 56.

[68] Kevin B. MacDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone (Writer’s Club Press, 2002), 173. This statement is made within the context of a discussion about the relationship between the Jews and gentile elites.

[69] Baltzell, 113. See also Howard Sachar, A History of the Jews in the Modern World (Vintage Books, 2006), 384-385, and Dinnerstein, 41.

Ahmad Al Khaled sends this information about himself:

I’m a freelance journalist mainly focused on the Middle-East and North Africa. I’ve been covering various conflicts in the region and notable political events  for the past 7 years.

I’ve had my articles published by leading regional and global media (Youm7, Jerusalem Post, Times of Israel, Ahval, etc.). Here are examples of my previous work:

https://www.jpost.com/
https://www.jpost.com/opinion/
https://globalsecurityreview.

After a four-year freeze in the conflict established as a result of negotiations between Turkey and Russia, the situation in Syria has changed dramatically. Within ten days of a rapid offensive, the fighters of the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham group established control over most of the country, forcing the government troops to retreat.

On the morning of December 8, armed opposition forces led by the HTS captured the capital of Damascus, thereby formalizing the fall of the Assad clan, which had been ruling Syria for more than 50 years. According to the latest information, former President Bashar Assad left the country and requested asylum in Russia.

The day before three guarantor countries — Turkey, Iran, and Russia — met in Qatar’s capital of Doha and stressed the need for political dialogue between the parties of the conflict to peacefully transfer power in the country and prevent bloodshed. In turn, the HTS command guaranteed the security of state institutions, diplomatic missions, and military facilities, including Assad’s allies — Russia and Iran.

Currently, due to the rapid changes taking place in Syria, it is difficult to predict how the situation in the Arab country will develop. However, the factors and circumstances that ensured jihadists’ success on the battlefield and their quick rise to power can already be studied in detail.

The new tactics of using small mobile groups on light automotive equipment, the use of reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles and strike first-per-view drones, as well as the timing suggest that the HTS could not organize an operation of such range alone. In this case, the question arises: who helped the HTS or at least played into its hands?

The role of Turkey

Answering this question, it is fair to say that Damascus and its allies, Russia and Iran, have closely watched the threats posed by the HTS. For the past three months, local media have been full of circulating reports of an impending attack by militants.

After establishing the ‘Idlib de-escalation zone’ as part of an agreement between Russia and Turkey in 2020, the HTS was able to get the most out of the calm at the front. This faction, formerly known as Jabhat al-Nusra, was previously part of Syria’s al-Qaeda terrorist organization but then distanced from it and emerged as one of the dominant forces in the northwest of Syria.

Since the observation points of the Turkish Armed Forces were deployed along the front line, they served as a kind of shield, behind which the HTS was able to hide and calmly build up forces without fear of a possible attack from Damascus and its foreign backers. Therefore, it is safe to say that Ankara’s diplomatic and military patronage directly contributed to the strengthening of the HTS stance, not to mention economic assistance and the supply of electricity and fuel to Idlib through Turkish umbrella companies.

Taking advantage of the fragmentation of other opposition groups, the HTS, led by its leader Abu Muhammad Al-Julani, managed to consolidate power in the rebellious province of Idlib. It completely captured the economic sector and has been ruling the so-called last bastion of the Syrian opposition through the puppet Syria Salvation government. Militarily, the HTS has also greatly strengthened, uniting under its banners many independent groups and foreign fighters from among Caucasians, Turks, and Uyghurs.

All these factors allowed the HTS to accumulate a sufficient margin of safety to make constant raids against government forces and even claim to expand the zone of influence in northern Syria. At the same time, its status as an independent group also provided it with additional opportunities, without limiting freedom of action to agreements with third countries.

Thus, Ankara de facto helped to nurture the HTS military machine, but de jure can avoid responsibility for its actions, as the HTS does not obey it entirely like the Turkish-affiliated Syrian National Army.

The role of Ukraine

It is not an exaggeration that any HTS activity was constantly the focus of attention of the main actors in Syria, especially Russia. Recently, Moscow has repeatedly stated that there is close cooperation between the HTS and its geopolitical adversary — Ukraine.

The Turkish newspaper Aydynlyk reported that Ukrainian instructors were training Syrian militants in the production and use of FPV drones to strike at military facilities of the Russian Armed Forces in Syria. It also said that in exchange for drones, Kyiv asked the HTS to allow its foreign militants, mainly immigrants from Caucasian and Central Asian countries, to reach Ukraine and fight against Russia.

Ukrainian media have also repeatedly published videos in which Syrian rebels in cooperation with Ukrainian intelligence hit Russian targets in Syria with strike drones. In one of these videos, the opposition fighters struck the facilities of the Russian Armed Forces at the Quwayres air base, east of Aleppo.

Notably, until the last HTS offensive, Ukrainian officials preferred to ignore the media claims about cooperation with Syrian rebels. However, after the capture of Aleppo, Kyiv finally made a sincere confession and said that the “Khymyk” group of Ukraine’s Main Directorate of Intelligence was preparing the HTS militants to use attack drones against Russia.

The role of the US

But if cooperation with the Ukrainian special services can explain the increased combat capabilities of the HTS in terms of the use of unmanned technologies, then the start time of the jihadists’ offensive indicates possible coordination with the United States. While the US has officially denied any involvement in current developments in Syria, there is direct and indirect evidence that suggests otherwise.

Firstly, the launch of the HTS offensive on Aleppo suspiciously coincided with the entry into force of the US-initiated peace treaty between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah on November 27. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to assume that the Syrian opposition waited for Israel to defeat Hezbollah to begin a campaign against the regime forces without fear that Lebanese fighters would come to help Assad.

Thus, it is clear that the United States played a major role in weakening Assad’s allies, which directly led to the HTS decision to attack.

Secondly, it should be noted that although the United States recognized the HTS as a terrorist organization, it did not interfere in any way with its trade ties with Turkey, also contributing to the economic strengthening of the HTS. This approach to the terrorist organization was in stark contrast to Washington’s unprecedented sanctions pressure on Damascus.

In addition, the United States and its allies in the International Coalition maintained close ties with the HTS. In particular, they exchange information in order to launch air strikes against field commanders of some independent armed groups active in Idlib province. Syrian opposition fighters on social networks repeatedly accused the HTS of providing the United States with accurate data on the whereabouts of the fighters hiding in the rebel-held areas. According to them, the US UAVs hit them almost immediately after meetings with the leaders of the HTS.

In addition, the United States and the EU over the past years have unofficially worked to “whitewash” the reputation of HTS to exclude it from the list of terrorist organizations. To present him as a leader of moderate opposition, several American publications conducted interviews with Abu Muhammad Al-Julani, in which the jihadist leader appeared in a business suit, and also abandoned his characteristic fanatical slogans in favor of more secular and pragmatic rhetoric. During the last offensive, Al-Julani also made some demonstrative statements in which he warned his fighters against illegal actions against civilians and their property, and also called for “respect for the cultural diversity of Aleppo”.

Given the covert interaction between the United States and the Al-Julani group, there is reason to believe that after the end of hostilities in Lebanon, the Biden administration could initiate another escalation in Syria, using the HTS militants as a proxy. Thus, the White House probably planned to weaken the position of its geopolitical rivals, Russia and Iran, before the imminent transfer of power to the newly elected president Donald Trump. Judging by his pre-election statements, the latter would hardly agree to such an adventure and would prefer to deal with domestic problems, rather than create the next hotbed of tension in the world or a particular region.

But Joe Biden’s foreign policy staff, finalizing the last two months of his term, could decide differently, especially when all the necessary conditions were ripe for the Syrian militants to attack. Russia withdrew the main troops from Syria and is fully focused on the war with Ukraine; another main ally of Damascus — Tehran is weakened as a result of constant attacks by Israel and threw its main forces to support affiliated formations in Palestine and Lebanon; and Hezbollah, which also played an important role in establishing the former status-quo in Syria, suffered significant losses during the IDF operations and can no longer help the Assad government.

Given the acute contradictions between the two political camps that emerged during the last elections in the US, it is not difficult to assume that the Democrats wanted to make it as difficult as possible for Trump upon entering office. They sought to shackle opportunities to later accuse him of failing to fulfill the promises he gave to American voters. Therefore, the new round of escalation in Syria can be seen as a desperate attempt by the current US administration to influence Trump’s future policies, to force him to wallow in endless conflicts and rivalries with other countries instead of solving more important problems related to domestic policy.

The large-scale HTS offensive has already dealt a heavy blow to civilians throughout Syria, significantly exacerbating the migration crisis and increasing the suffering of ordinary Syrians from renewed clashes and shelling. At the same time, regardless of the further development of events in the Arab country, the United States, as the main international actor, has done nothing to prevent the strengthening of the HTS. Moreover, Washington purposefully encouraged the HTS to use it as a counterweight to Damascus and its rivals in the region — Russia and Iran. And while the winners in this geopolitical game are unclear, the loser is already obvious: this is the Syrian people, who once again became a “bargaining chip” and are paying with blood for other states’ ambitions.