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Arizona Civics Podcast
Welcome to the Arizona Civics Podcast. This podcast aims to share our journey of sustaining Arizona’s interests in reforms to civic education by working with civic educators in our state. This work is being done by the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University. I am your host, Liz Evans, Civic Education and Outreach Program Director at ASU, and I will interview Arizona teachers, content experts, and leaders in civic education. We hope you enjoy our journey to make Arizona a national civics model!
Arizona Civics Podcast
The Man in the Arena: Teddy Roosevelt's Complex Relationship with American Jews
Discover the untold story of Theodore Roosevelt's complex relationship with Jewish Americans in this fascinating exploration of presidential leadership, identity politics, and American pluralism. At a time when America's Jewish population nearly doubled through immigration from Eastern Europe, Roosevelt navigated competing pressures with characteristic energy and contradictions.
The Lower East Side of Manhattan emerges as a vibrant backdrop to this narrative – a neighborhood of both crushing hardship and boundless opportunity for Jewish immigrants. Here, Roosevelt built an unlikely political alliance that helped secure his electoral success while challenging the traditional party alignments of his era. What drove this connection between the aristocratic Republican president and these newly arrived immigrants? Was it genuine sympathy or shrewd political calculation? As with most historical questions, the answer isn't simply one or the other.
Roosevelt's advocacy for persecuted Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe broke with diplomatic traditions of non-interference in other nations' internal affairs. Yet this same champion could occasionally indulge in the stereotypical thinking common among elites of his time. This paradox reflects Roosevelt's own complex character – the boxing enthusiast who won the Nobel Peace Prize, the Harvard scholar who became a Dakota cowboy. These contradictions make Roosevelt not exceptional but quintessentially American, embodying the very tensions that have defined our national character.
Perhaps most relevant for today's conversations about identity and belonging, Roosevelt promoted a vision where Jewish Americans need not choose between their religious heritage and civic identity. By encouraging Jews to embrace their traditions while fully participating in American life, Roosevelt helped shape a pluralistic vision that continues to resonate in our diverse society. His story offers valuable lessons for navigating our era's challenges around inclusion, representation, and what it means to be American.
Whether you're a history enthusiast, educator, or simply curious about this pivotal era in American life, this conversation delivers rich insights into how the past continues to inform our present. Listen now to understand how Roosevelt's relationship with Jewish Americans reveals timeless truths about leadership, diplomacy, and the ongoing American experiment.
See more on Andrew Porwancher and order his book here.
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You are just our returning summer guest. I feel like Dr Perwancher, because last summer we did one on Alexander Hamilton and now we're doing one on Teddy Roosevelt, who you and I have had this conversation before. Teddy Roosevelt is my historical crush. I have his quote the oh my gosh, the man in the arena quote hanging in my bedroom because I just love Teddy Roosevelt, I love the stories about him, and today we're going to talk about a story I've literally never heard about, and this is why I love having you on the podcast. So before we get started, can you kind of reintroduce yourself to our listeners and give us a little snippet about the book?
Speaker 2:Sure, well, first off, thank you for having me back. We'll have to make this a summer tradition in perpetuity. So I am a professor of constitutional history here at Skettle Maccabee. Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews. And Roosevelt had a deep and really interesting and complicated relationship with the Jewish community, and it's a story that, for all the ink spilled on Roosevelt, hasn't been told before. So this is the first book on the subject and this is the first podcast interview the subject and this is the first podcast interview I'm doing about this book, and so I'm very excited to do it with you, liz.
Speaker 1:So, looking at this, I mean I will say to readers I read this, it took me two days. I'm a very versiferous reader, but it was about 250 pages and it wasn't. We were kind of talking about this before when we're doing our little pre-show, but I appreciate your writing because it's not. Sometimes we read books that are just very, very academic and I appreciate those books as somebody who is currently studying and writing a dissertation, those books as somebody who is currently studying and writing a dissertation. But I think for educators, this is something that is an easy read. It's an interesting read. There's a lot of really good stories in there.
Speaker 1:So I hope that the questions we asked today really get people to want to read this because, I mean, I just loved exploring this side of Roosevelt. So a lot of educators today are really exploring how to teach complex historical figures. That is something that I think teachers have been grappling with for a while. How do you think Roosevelt's kind of contradictory attitude toward Jewish Americans ranging anywhere from advocacy to stereotyping should be presented in the classroom? Like, how should we talk about this?
Speaker 2:Well, I'm a huge fan of primary sources. Let's get students touching the raw material of history. You know, one of my greatest pleasures as a historian is getting to go into the archives and I tell my students you know, if I went through, you know, broken to your house and read through your diary and went through all your emails and private correspondence, like I would get arrested and I should be. But when you do that to a long deceased president, you get a and you get to publish what you find to the world. You're actually celebrated for doing it. It's. It's pretty extraordinary that I actually get to get away with this for a living. Feels like I should be getting in trouble, and so I love to be able to share those kinds of private revelations that you find in diaries and in letters and in newspaper accounts and the like. So one of my goals in giving students exposure to that raw source material from the historical record is, as you indicated, to get them to engage with complexity.
Speaker 2:Roosevelt is such a rich figure to study because he is so complex, because he embodies the very complexities of the nation that elected him.
Speaker 2:Here is the boxing ring brawler who's also a wordsmithing scholar. Here is the bloodthirsty colonel who also wins the Nobel Peace Prize. Here is the Dakota Badlands cowboy, who is also a Harvard gentleman. He is all of these things and his relationship with Jews is very much part of that set of contradictions. He has a deep and genuine connection with the Jewish community. He is an outspoken advocate for Jews overseas at a time when Jews were being subjected to mass violence in Eastern Europe. And yet at the same time we can see Roosevelt sometimes indulging in some of the anti-Semitic stereotyping that were common in elite circles at that time. And part of our job as students of the past is to try to reckon with that history in its full complexity. And I think if we try to project too much coherence on someone as self-contradictory as Roosevelt, we risk papering over the real story, which are the internal contradictions that he has that in so many ways personify America as a nation of contradictions.
Speaker 1:I love that because I think that sometimes, when we study historical figures, we tend to put them in two boxes right, they're right or they're wrong, they're good or they're bad, but at the end of the day, they're people, and humans are complex. This isn't something that can be put neatly in a box. So what kind of lessons can students learn from his kind of blend of? Is it philo-Semitism or philo?
Speaker 2:I never know how to say that. Philo-semitism yeah.
Speaker 1:Philo-Semitism and anti-Semitism.
Speaker 2:Well, philo-semitism refers to an appreciation for, an affection for, the people in faith of Judaism, and anti-Semitism, of course, just the opposite. And one of the things that I think makes Roosevelt an interesting figure to study is that America itself has had a complicated relationship with the Jewish people. There are real deep strains of philo-Semitism in American history, going back all the way to the founding of the country, as you and I talked about last summer when we talked about Alexander Hamilton, who was a champion for American Jewry, as was George Washington, who famously writes in his 1790 Newport letter to the Jews of Rhode Island that in the United States we give to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. And yet we also see real strains of anti-Semitism in the founding era and people who wanted to exclude Jews from the ballot box, from the legal profession, from elected office. And throughout American history we can see anti-Semitism sometimes wax, sometimes wane.
Speaker 2:Roosevelt's era coincided with mass Jewish migration to America. If you look at the quarter millennium stretching from the days of Dutch colonial rule in Manhattan up until the eve of Roosevelt's presidency 250 years America amassed a Jewish population of one million people. It took only the seven and a half years of his presidency to nearly double that figure. And it was amid that mass migration of Jews fleeing violence in Eastern Europe and finding safe refuge here in America that that prompts, among some people in the United States, an anti-Semitic reaction, a resistance to these newcomers. There were also many Americans who embraced these Jewish refugees with open arms.
Speaker 2:There was a potent strain of Christianity that Roosevelt subscribed to, known as social gospel Protestantism, that called on Christians to operationalize their faith through deeds, and part of that meant stretching their hands out to these Jewish victims of persecution who were seeking refuge in the new world. And so Roosevelt's own checkered relationship with the Jewish people, marked as it was by largely philo-Semitism but marred by moments of anti-Semitism, really personifies a moment in American history and a kind of narrative that has that runs from the founding era to the modern era, where anti-Semitism crests and then it reaches a valley and then it crests again. And today, in 2025, we are unfortunately seeing historic rates of antisemitism for the modern era, and that's one of the reasons why I write in the book's opening introduction that Roosevelt's story with the Jewish people has lessons that I describe as timelessly urgent. They're urgent because they matter so much now, and they're timeless because we see them recur over the quarter millennium of American history.
Speaker 1:So your book details Roosevelt's involvement in both foreign and domestic Jewish affairs. What does his story kind of reveal about the role of empathy and political calculation in policymaking, and how can educators use this to teach leadership and civic responsibility?
Speaker 2:It's a really good question, because empathy and political calculation were both at play in Roosevelt's what I call his Jewish diplomacy. So the key question confronting Roosevelt was what to do about what were known as the pogroms, these violent assaults that were taking place against Jews by ordinary Russians, often with the consent or even the support of local and national Russian authorities. And American Jews were deeply worried about their Jewish brothers and sisters, metaphorically and literally, who were back in the Tsar's dominion, suffering under this kind of violent autocracy. And there was tremendous pressure on Roosevelt from certain quarters, certainly from Jewish quarters in the United States, to intercede. And there was also resistance, particularly from many members of his State Department, because there was a custom at that time in international relations that one nation should not comment on affairs of another nation that's wholly internal to that other country, even on humanitarian grounds. And so Roosevelt is pulled between these conflicting forces.
Speaker 2:But more often than not Roosevelt does speak out, in a way that other heads of state do not, in defense of these persecuted Jews living under czarist rule, and he does that partly out of a genuine sympathy for Jews.
Speaker 2:And we know that it's genuine because sometimes he is engaging in quiet diplomacy with diplomatic efforts for Jews, precisely because he wanted to publicize them right before a given election cycle. It was often the case, in even numbered years, that he made his Jewish foreign policy the handmaiden of his electioneering, of his electioneering. And so Roosevelt had raw political self-interest and he had genuine sympathy, and it would be folly for us to fixate on one to the exclusion of the other, because both of these factors were at play. And so my recommendation, as we try to teach this material to students, is to understand that historical figures, much like political leaders today, are under pressure from multiple external forces, and they are also informed by their own internal moral compass moral compass and it is our job as students of the past to try, as best we can, to come to grips with the totality of those circumstances.
Speaker 1:I love that. I'm just like I love talking about these kinds of things because I wish that more people understood that being a student of the past and learning really helps contextualize things that are happening currently and gives you a little bit more insight and empathy with the empathy, the understanding you know, with the empathy, the understanding. So the English nerd in me is reading through this narrative right, because it is not dry academia and the Lower East Side kind of almost appears to be a character in this, reflecting both hardship and hope. So how might this setting, like you know, place-based history, how could this help educators bring immigration stories to life for students who are learning about American identity and pluralism?
Speaker 2:I'm so glad that you asked me about this because it was really important to me to bring the Lower East Side to life. That neighborhood, that enclave in Lower Manhattan was the epicenter of American Jewish life during Roosevelt's era and it is a central scene to so many of the happenings that I describe in this book. Roosevelt gets his start in New York politics as the young, 36-year-old police commissioner where he barnstorms the Lower East Side block by block, giving speeches to Jewish immigrants, where he espouses his egalitarian vision for American society. And he is actually wholly anomalous among Republicans because it was traditionally Democratic turf in that he wins the Lower East Side as a presidential candidate, a total outlier among Republicans at the time. It is really an index of the depth of his popularity on the Lower East Side, which was overwhelmingly populated by Eastern European Jewish refugees of violence in places like Russia and Romania.
Speaker 2:Now, it was so important to me to try to bring that setting to life that I spend, you know, I think, maybe something like the first 15 pages of chapter one just walking the reader street by street through the Lower East Side. What were the sights, what were the sounds? What would it be like to go to a restaurant at the time. If you wanted to discreetly gamble, what was that like? What were the plays being put on in the Yiddish theaters? How did they adapt Shakespearean classics? What would 13 cents get you at a lunch counter? This was what an editor of mine likes to call the heat and dust of history. To bring to life that lived experience and what it was like to be on the subway.
Speaker 2:And what you find in the Lower East Side is that it is a place that is both rife with hazard and rich with hope. On the one hand, you have people who are really densely packed in to just a couple square miles of teeming humanity. They are living in tenement buildings, these five to eight story tall brick buildings, where the apartments are often doubling as sweatshops, and you could find a dozen people in a single room slaving over sewing machines. These were rough conditions. There was limited hygiene, many of the rooms didn't have running water or natural light. And yet on the Lower East Side, there were educational opportunities. There was public schooling 19 out of 20 students in a public school in the Lower East Side was Jewish. If you go back to many parts of the old world, especially in Eastern Europe, there were quotas on how many Jews could go to a school. Not so in America. In the old world there were quotas on how many Jews could be in a given profession, but on the Lower East Side, if you were able to get yourself educated and there were opportunities for that, you could or your children could, climb their way into the ranks of the middle or even upper classes. Jewish children on the Lower East Side enjoyed a remarkable degree of upward mobility. That would have been unimaginable in the old country. And on the Lower East Side, a Jew who became a naturalized citizen could count a vote, they could cast a ballot that would tally just the same as the wealthiest Gentiles, and it was the epicenter of the Jewish bid to grasp for the American dream.
Speaker 2:And so, as with so much else in this book, we want to grapple with that full complexity, the way that immigrants in New York at that time struggled, but also the opportunities that they had. There's a reason that they came to America, opportunities that they had. There's a reason that they came to America. There's a reason that they gave up everything that they had to try their shot here in the new world.
Speaker 2:And one of the things that's striking about the Lower East Side is that you know at that time, if you go a few blocks in one direction, you're in Chinatown.
Speaker 2:You go a few blocks in another direction, you're in Little Italy. You go a few blocks in yet another direction, you're in an Irish neighborhood, and immigrants were struggling in all of those neighborhoods. In many ways this isn't a uniquely Jewish story, the story of ethnic slum life in New York. All of these immigrant groups are coming to the New World looking for opportunity, finding novel challenges but also striving for novel opportunities. Challenges but also striving for novel opportunities. And one lesson we can take from that is that this immigrant experience in many ways is not exceptional and that in many ways the Jewish story of this era is also the Italian story of this era. It's also the Irish story of this era, it's also the Chinese story of this era and I think, as a historian, if I'm doing my job well, I'm helping people see these particular pieces of American history not as disaggregated from the rest of it but as part of a larger whole.
Speaker 1:I really appreciate having the ability to kind of again set myself into a book before diving into other things, and I appreciate too that you're talking about really the New York immigrant experience and putting us in that place, because I think that for readers and for lovers of history, places are just as important as people. You discuss how Roosevelt's actions often reflected political demands of courting the Jewish vote. In what ways does this history challenge or reinforce the idea of identity-based voting blocks, and how can civic educators help students think critically about this today, because this is not the first or the last time a president has done this?
Speaker 2:Yeah well, by now your listeners will be unsurprised to know that my answer is going to be a long version of it was complicated because, on the one hand, roosevelt prided himself on treating Jews as Americans. He said I'm not here to appeal to them as Jews. I am treating them, I'm giving them a square deal, I'm treating them in an equality with everybody else. At the same time, he often did court Jews as Jews, in the sense that he would say, appoint a Jew to a particularly prominent position right before an election and then admit in private correspondence that he had done that for electoral purposes. He might go out of his way to line up Jewish surrogates to barnstorm Jewish neighborhoods. He would sometimes push to declassify certain diplomatic correspondence about his efforts to help Jews overseas right before an election. And Roosevelt is courting Jews as Jews because Jews often wanted to be courted as Jews. They care deeply about the fate of their co-religionists overseas, fate of their co-religionists overseas, and so it is only natural that they were curious about what politicians, roosevelt included, planned to do to help their persecuted brothers and sisters back in the old country. And so he's torn. He wants American life to be this identity neutral civic sphere where everyone is on inequality precisely because your identity doesn't matter. And yet at the same time there is a reality that Jewish voters cared about Jewish issues and he was responsive to that. You need not choose between an American civic identity and your individual religious or cultural heritage and that's why in America people can be proudly Irish American or African American or Chinese American or Jewish American.
Speaker 2:And one of the reasons why I titled this book American Maccabee is because Roosevelt, when he talked about wanting to find brawny Jews for his police force in New York when he ran the NYPD there, he said he wanted the Maccabee type. There was a stereotype that Jews were frail, they were pallid, they were undernourished from their oppression in the old world. And Roosevelt in effect was saying to Jews you don't have to disavow your Jewish identity to live up to my ideal of courage and virility. You can lean into your own Jewish tradition of the Maccabees and use that as a way of being proud Americans, use that as a way of being members of his force who were defenders of the people and of the people's law. And so pluralism, I think, is a way that Roosevelt tries to reconcile his bid to engage Jews on their own terms, but do it in a way that made Jews part of a broader family of American citizenship.
Speaker 1:So for our listeners that maybe don't know, like when you're talking about what a Maccabee is, can you give us a little bit more information on that?
Speaker 2:Oh for sure. Yeah, Forgive me here, so you know, I'll, I'll. I'll mention this maybe through Roosevelt's own lens, and I didn't get into this in the book, so this will be new to you, Liz. But when Roosevelt was a boy, he goes to the Holy land. In his adolescence, His family was very wealthy. When these people went on vacation, it wasn't for a week, they'd go for 15 months all over the world. And they go to the Holy Land when he's a kid.
Speaker 2:He actually keeps a daily diary and he goes to part of what is now in the modern state of Israel. That was a particularly important site millennia earlier when the Maccabees, this group of Jewish warriors, rebelled against Greek persecution and they actually set fire to a harbor that Roosevelt had come into from Alexandria on his journey, and so he almost certainly learned something of this Maccabean lore. And so these Maccabean rebels, these proud Jewish warriors from ancient history, were precisely the model that he encouraged Jewish children to look to as paragons, and he actually writes a letter during Hanukkah. In one particular December during his presidency, he writes a letter to a group of Jewish children on the Lower East Side and he says to them that by embracing the tradition of the Maccabees that will actually help them come into closer relationship with their fellow Gentile Americans. It is precisely by honoring your own heritage that you will find your belonging in the United States.
Speaker 1:I love that. So I've talked a lot about your writing. Again, as somebody who is a there like I just can eat up history books. I love them. You teach a class. Can you talk a little bit about that Because I'm going to link it in our show notes because I had said when I am finished with my dissertation it's a class that I would want to take, just because it sounds awesome.
Speaker 2:Well, you're welcome to audit anytime I teach a class. I've taught it once so far at ASU and I hope to teach it again sometime in the next couple of years, and it is on the craft of writing narrative history. I'm a firm believer that storytelling from the beginning of human history has been the most powerful tool we have for communicating from mind to mind. We, you know, geneticists, some evolutionary psychologists as well believe that we are actually hardwired in our brains neural networks, to understand the world through storytelling, and so I love to think hard with my students about what are the elements that make good storytelling. What can we do? How do we pay relentless attention to detail as writers of history so that for the reader it feels like a seamless, immersive narrative experience? And I'm working on a side project, on a book that was really inspired by that class.
Speaker 2:Oftentimes the best ideas for books for professors come from the classroom, and so I'm working on a book about the craft of writing narrative history and taking examples from the readings that I assigned in that class, and I'm going to walk readers through how the real masters of the craft today approach questions like scene setting, as we were talking about character development. How do you take an argument and encode it into a narrative arc? How do you subtly weave themes into a story? And so these are the kinds of questions that are often thought of as the preserve of novelists, of filmmakers, and I believe that they should absolutely be central to what historians are doing. And that's not to say that there isn't room in the profession it's a big time profession to do other kinds of history.
Speaker 2:Some topics are better suited to specialists, but it strikes me in this moment where we're all dazzled by new technological wonders, that this ancient art of storytelling remains profoundly powerful.
Speaker 2:And I think that historians, especially in the academy, should look for opportunities to bring the rigor of their training and their background in archival research and wed that to the kind of great storytelling that we see from a novelist or a filmmaker or even a journalist and bring that to the public. Because I think it would be a loss if professional historians in academia seeded the kind of historical storytelling that you see on the shelves in Barnes Noble just to others who aren't in the academy. And I think when you're at a public university, as we are at Arizona State University, it is a special privilege and a special opportunity to get to spend the time when I'm not in the classroom writing history. That is for the broader public, and so I'm excited I've taught a class on it. I'm excited to write a book about the process and I'm excited to continue to find stories that matter to me and share them with readers and, through podcasts, with listeners like you folks at home listening today.
Speaker 1:So is that going to be our next summer's one, because summer seems to be our time.
Speaker 2:Whatever you'd like. I'm also working on a sequel to my Roosevelt book focused on his post-presidency. So Roosevelt develops this relationship with this circle of young female Jewish immigrant writers who are producing memoirs and novels about the Jewish female immigrant experience. He also launches a very interesting race for the presidency with his third party, the Bull Moose Party, in 1912, where he's very involved with Jewish women in that effort. It's when he first endorses suffrage, and it is also in the sequel that will take up the question of Zionism. Roosevelt during World War I becomes an outspoken proponent of the idea of a Jewish homeland. Indeed, he supports the idea of a Jewish homeland for many nations that did not have states at that time, and so there was so much to cover that we could do something. On Roosevelt, we'll have several summers already gamed out, so I'm happy to talk about any of these topics any summer, in whichever order you like.
Speaker 1:We might have to start doing like seasonal ones, like one in the summer, one in the fall, because that again, just the way you're telling the story. I'm like, wait, seriously, like I want to know more about this and this is. I think this is why I love historical fiction so much is because I get involved with these characters and then it leads me to wanting to read more of the historical books and learning more about them, because I think that that was kind of my gateway into history these characters. Teddy Roosevelt is a person, but I see him more as a character and it's so deeply complex and there's so many stories and so many sides that I haven't even began to explore because there's just so much.
Speaker 1:And that's what I miss about, I think, the diary keeping. You talked about him keeping a diary on these vacations. This is something different than we do now, but I love those pieces and these looks into these people. So I hope this doesn't offend any of my other guests, but you are one of my favorite people to talk to because I genuinely feel like I could just talk to you forever. Thank you so much A for letting me read the book early, because I very much enjoyed it, but also for just loving this stuff. So much A for letting me read the book early because I very much enjoyed it, but also for just loving this stuff so much and creating a very accessible entry point into history for people who maybe aren't historians and don't really know where to start. So thank you so much.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Thank you. It is always such a pleasure to talk history with you, Liz. You and I and a couple other colleagues are carrying the banner for history at Skettle. We're surrounded by political theorists and we appreciate them. Conversation with someone who shares my passion for history, and so I really appreciate the opportunity to bring this story of Teddy Roosevelt and the Jews to your listeners. So thank you so much.
