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The First to Cry Down Injustice? Western Jews and Japanese Removal during World War II. By Ellen M. Eisenberg. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. xxi + 179 pp.
The First to Cry Down Injustice? examines west-coast Jews' response to the mass removal and imprisonment of western Japanese-descent populations during World War II. In her study of the relatively underexplored topic of western Jewish history, Ellen Eisenberg notes that, despite their growing vocal commitment to fighting persecution against minorities, most western Jews remained silent about the incarceration. In this regard they resembled their Jewish counterparts nationwide. They were different from American Jews elsewhere, not because their silence stemmed from apathy or ignorance-as Cheryl Greenberg has argued concerning the national Jewish population-but rather because western Jews' silence was a conscious decision.1 Their proximity to relatively large Japanese-descent populations and their exposure to long-term anti- Japanese propaganda and press coverage meant that Jews in California, Oregon, and Washington-particularly in the main urban areas where most Jews lived-could not ignore the issue.
Western urban Jews' conscious silence partly reflected their sense of their own ethnoracial location, including growing insecurity about rising domestic and global antisemitism. They had enjoyed a history of relative inclusion compared to their national counterparts during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The presence and exclusion of a significant population of more clearly nonwhite Latinos, Native Americans, and particularly Asians and Asian Americans helped create a relatively inclusive whiteness around them as well as other eastern and southern Europeandescent populations. Jews even participated in the anti-Asian movement, and some were members of anti-Asian organizations like the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West, until the early twentieth century. This changed during the 1920s and 1930s...