Unpresidential Jewish joke again whitewashed

Another Presidents Day, another whitewash of a president’s “joke” about Jews.  The latest offender is Susan Butler’s “Roosevelt and Stalin: Portrait of a Partnership,” a recent entry in the very long list of books about President Franklin D. Roosevelt. It “describes in meticulous detail the proceedings at the Tehran and Yalta conferences,” according to Kirkus Reviews. The Christian Science Monitor agrees that Butler has “a firm grasp on the details.”

Except for one detail that Butler skipped and the reviewers haven’t noticed: An unpleasant “joke” about Jews that Roosevelt told Stalin at Yalta in 1945. Butler is the latest in a long line of FDR-admiring authors and historians who have omitted or minimized what Roosevelt said to Stalin about Jews.

Ten years after Yalta, the State Department released the transcript of FDR’s conversations with Stalin—but several lines were censored because State feared it would harm Roosevelt’s image if the public knew what he said about Jews.

U.S. News & World Report revealed the unpleasant truth: When FDR mentioned he would soon be seeing Saudi leader Ibn Saud, Stalin asked if he intended to make any concessions to the king, and “the president replied that there was only one concession he thought he might offer and that was to give him the 6 million Jews in the United States.” 

Was the “we don’t want Jews and he wouldn’t either” spirit of Roosevelt’s remark all in good fun, or did it on some level reflect FDR’s private feelings about Jews? Certainly it was not an isolated instance of such humor. For example, Roosevelt once joked that relatives might suspect his fifth child was Jewish, in view of the baby’s “slightly Hebraic nose.” FDR’s grandson Curtis recalled “hearing the president tell mildly anti-Semitic stories in the White House,” in which “the protagonists were always Lower East Side Jews with heavy accents.”