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Andrew Porwancher, "American Maccabee: Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews" (Princeton UP, 2025)
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Andrew Porwancher
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Andrew Porwancher
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Andrew Porwancher
Liberty.
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Andrew Porwancher
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Amber Nichol
Hello, listeners. Welcome back to New Books and Jewish Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Amber Nichol, the host of the channel. And today we are going to be talking with Andrew Porwancher about his most recent publication, American Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews, which came out on Princeton University Press this year. Among his numerous accolades, Andrew is a professor of history at Arizona State University. He previously served as the May Fellow at Harvard, the Horn Fellow at Oxford, and the Garwood Fellow at Princeton. He is also the author of several books, including the Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, which we actually discussed together on New Books Network Jewish Studies a few years ago. And even more exciting, we just received news that his book won the Theodore Roosevelt Book Prize and he just found out yesterday. So, Andrew, welcome back to the channel.
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Andrew Porwancher
Amber, thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be back.
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Amber Nichol
I'm thrilled to have you. I'm actually really excited to discuss this text with you today. I'm generally a scholar of Central and Eastern European Jewry. However, as a scholar of Jewish studies and a big fan of your prior work, I was immediately excited to learn more about how Teddy Roosevelt's biography intersected with Jewish experiences. I'm also so glad that I sat down with the book, which offers a vibrant window not only into Teddy' but also into the experiences of Jewish immigrants in the United States from the Russian empire in Romania. I'm curious about the path that really led you to this topic. What motivated you to research and write the American Maccabee?
- [03:07]
Andrew Porwancher
Well, you were talking earlier about my book about Hamilton, and I was curious in Roosevelt that he was so interested in Hamilton because of the Broadway musical. We sort of forget, given how popular Hamilton's been the last 10 years, that he was kind of the punching bag of the American founders for most of American history. And yet Roosevelt really had this affinity for Hamilton. And I thought, growing out of my Hamilton research, if Roosevelt thought so well of Hamilton in a way that was somewhat anomalous, might it be the case that, that Roosevelt shared some of Hamilton's philo Semitic instincts? And I was talking to the great scholar, the world's leading authority on American Jewish history, Jonathan Sarna, and he had said to me, you know, Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt is the, the one president where there really needs to be a book on his relationship with the Jewish community. But it hasn't been done yet. And so when, when Sarna gives you the green light, you, you go full speed. And so I delve down this six year rabbit hole and, and ended up producing American Maccabee.
- [04:20]
Amber Nichol
And that title is amazingly clever, especially given your larger arguments about Theodore Roosevelt and his perceptions of, and relationships with Jews. In many ways, he saw himself in Jews and vice versa. As your text points out, his idolization of the Maccabees really highlights this for listeners today. Please share just a little bit about Roosevelt's upbringing, his encounters with Maccabee history, and the reasons why he filtered Jewish experiences through this more redemptive arch.
- [04:52]
Andrew Porwancher
So Roosevelt grows up as the son of a very wealthy family, but he's a very sickly child. His father says to Theodore, you have the mind, but you have not the body. You must make your body. And Roosevelt, who had this very severe case of asthma and he had nervous diarrhea and a plethora of problems, he resolves that he, he is going to make his body. He is going to make this great weakness of his, his physical frailty, a great strength, and he ends up boxing. In college, he becomes a cowboy. In the Dakota Badlands, he famously becomes a military hero. He travels this path from frailty and to fortitude. And he sees in many of the Jews who are coming from Eastern Europe to America a similar journey. They're coming malnourished from the old world. And then the children of these Jewish immigrants are flocking to boxing gyms to prove their manhood, to prove their mettle and so Roosevelt was always very interested in the Maccabees, these ancient Jewish warrior rebels, because he saw them as both of course, very Jewish, but very heroic, very courageous. When Roosevelt led the nypd, he was always on the lookout to recruit Jews whose vigor and valor was reminiscent of the Maccabee warriors. And so I think Roosevelt's lifelong interest and valorization of the Maccabees reflects both his particular premium on a kind of rugged masculinity that had a kind of martial inflection. And it also reflected Roosevelt's belief that Jews could find their belonging in America not by shedding their Jewishness, but by embracing the most lionized, heroic aspects of their own Jewish tradition, which for Roosevelt was the Maccabee warriors.
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Amber Nichol
And throughout your text, you really point out that Roosevelt is of kind of two minds when it comes to Jews. You refer to this the two Roosevelts. One leans towards philosemitism, the other towards antisemitism. How do these two seemingly incompatible worldviews shape his approach to local, national and international geopolitics?
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Andrew Porwancher
Roosevelt is such a rich figure to study because his contradictions embody America's own. Roosevelt, as you know, on the one hand, has this steeply philo Semitic streak. He has great reverence for the Jewish people. He includes Jews among close friends. He speaks well of their faith, of their history, of their culture. He extends a welcoming arm to them at a time when many other members of the elite Anglo Saxon Protestants were not willing to embrace Jews. And yet, at the same time, Roosevelt was capable of trafficking in some of the anti Semitic stereotypes that were common among those elite WASPs. And so Roosevelt, you know, for instance, refers to a journalist that he disliked who happened to be Jewish as a circumcised skunk. He says about a Jewish politician that was trying to railroad Roosevelt. Early in Roosevelt's career, he called him a sheeny, which is a epithet for a Jew that is not common today. But it was more common back then. And it was sufficiently offensive that shortly after Roosevelt's death, when a collection of his letters is produced, the letter in which he uses the term Sheeney was bolderized so that it read Cursin instead of Sheeney. So it was offensive by the standards of its own day. And what was so striking to me is about Theodore Roosevelt was that oftentimes his philo Semitism and anti Semitism could actually work in tandem rather than intention. For example, Roosevelt says that Jewish children are actually better students than American children in the schools in the United States. And so on. The one Hand, Roosevelt is elevating Jews. He's honoring Jews for their intellectual abilities. And yet at the same time, by he's saying that Jews were better students than the American students, he's suggesting that Jews are somehow not quite American. And as other scholars have noted, this sort of unusual, paradoxical way in which antisemitism and philo Semitism could meld in one person was actually not atypical for that period. Many Americans had both of these elements in them. And I think that Roosevelt's mixed approach on Jews as you know, it was reflected locally, nationally, internationally, in a variety of ways. Sometimes Roosevelt stood up for the Jewish community. Other times he exercised restraint and silence in the face of Jewish oppression. Sometimes Roosevelt was willing to chastise other Protestant elites for their anti Semitism. And other times he perpetuated the very stereotypes that he would condemn in others. And so that kind of complexity that we see in the historical record is it's central to Roosevelt and it's central to his experience with the Jewish community.
- [10:37]
Amber Nichol
There are a lot of great examples of this paradox, which I think you rightly point out is really kind of an American paradox of sorts as well. But one of the cases that embodies this Rooseveltian paradox that really stood out to me as a reader was the Alvaart affair. Would you mind sharing this story with listeners just so they have something to kind of look out for?
- [10:59]
Andrew Porwancher
Yeah, I'm really glad that you asked me about this, because whenever I have the opportunity to give a lecture on the book, I always mention this anecdote because it seems to really resonate with audiences. Herman Alvart was a notorious German hate monger, and he was almost cartoonishly villainous. Back in the 1880s, he had been fired as the headmaster of his school when it was discovered that Olvart had stolen the funds designated for the children's annual Christmas party. A decade later, when Roosevelt is the head of the New York Police Department, all the planned a tour of America to spread his hateful message. And provocatively, he scheduled a lecture on the Lower east side, which was the beating heart of American Jewish life. And anxious Jews approached Commissioner Roosevelt and asked TR to bar Alvart from speaking, or to at least to deny Alvart a police detail. But Roosevelt could not grant that request without undermining the principle of freedom of speech. And so Roosevelt decides he's going to do something very clever. He quietly resolves unto himself that he will indeed provide Alvar to police detail consisting exclusively of Jewish officers. Roosevelt tells a deputy of his to round up a few dozen Jewish policemen for Roosevelt's inspection. And it was important to Roosevelt that these men look unmistakably Jewish. In Roosevelt's words, and I'm quoting here. Don't bother yourself to hunt up their religious antecedents, he told the deputy. Take only those who have the most pronounced Hebrew physiognomy. The stronger their ancestral marking, the better. Now, these Jewish officers were brought before Roosevelt, and he surveys them and launches into a speech explaining this vital and unusual duty ahead of them. The protection of an enemy and the defense of free speech in the chief city of the United States. What Roosevelt understood was that the sight of Jews protecting all of art did far more to undermine all of our hateful message than preemptive censorship ever could have.
- [13:12]
Amber Nichol
And the way you write it in the text makes it, like, come alive on the page. So I hope that listeners sit down with the text and read this story as well. It's something I will certainly be incorporating into classrooms in the future. So I want to transition a little bit from kind of Roosevelt's policies at home to his policies abroad. In many ways, he was an unexpected president. President assuming the office only after McKinley's assassination. And up until that point, as you address in the text, he had focused on Jewish belonging at home and in New York, really. However, his presidency dovetailed with some of the most difficult years for Jews abroad, particularly in Romania and the Russian empire. So throughout all of this, what were the differences between the Jews he consulted and the Jews he championed? And why does that matter?
- [14:02]
Andrew Porwancher
It's such an important question. The real crisis, as you note during Roosevelt's presidency for global Jewry, was the fate of Eastern European Jews who were facing the twin challenges of second class citizenship that was legally sanctioned by places like Romania and Russia and extralegal violence in the form of pogroms, these mob attacks that would savage Jewish communities. Now, Roosevelt, in attempting to navigate this challenge, what do you do with this humanitarian crisis abroad? And how do you navigate the unprecedented influx of Jewish refugees packing the docks at American ports? Roosevelt turns not to Jews in America who had Eastern European roots. He turns not to Jews coming from the kinds of places where Jews are most under threat. Instead, he turns to the elite Jews who came from Central Europe, or sometimes called the uptown Jews. The uptown Jews tended to come from places like Germany. They had come over to America in the middle decades of the 19th century. They were not recent immigrants. They'd become Americanized. They'd met with great success in fields like banking and law and Roosevelt relies on these uptown, affluent Jews to be advisors and to be spokespeople for the mass of their indigent, embattled Eastern European co religionists. And so it is striking that Roosevelt is concerned about the plight of Jews abroad. And yet there is this very sharply defined class distinction where he is willing almost exclusively to rely on the elite uptown Central European Jews to speak for people whose own experiences were quite different than their own. It suggests that there, there is a certain classism within Roosevelt's advocacy for the Jewish community, even as Roosevelt was willing to buck his own class and eschew the views of many of the Anglo Saxon elite who populated the State Department. So there are again we come to this, this central theme of the book and of this interview, of Roosevelt's complexity. He is hard to fit in a box. He's bucking class from the elite Anglo Saxon perspective, and yet he's reinforcing class divides within the Jewish community through whom he chooses to include in that Jewish kitchen cabinet.
- [16:49]
Amber Nichol
Roosevelt is such a complex character and you explicitly take this up in the introduction. You say that it's not your goal, but as an interviewer, I still feel compelled to ask, does this text force a reconsideration of Roosevelt's legacy? And if it does, what should that reconsideration be?
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Andrew Porwancher
Well, I did try to avoid that question in the introduction, but you've cornered me here in this interview, so I'll take the bait and answer it as best I can. I write in the introduction that whether a reader moves on from this book, closes its covers and thinks better or ill of the 26th President is their prerogative. But neither outcome is my goal. My goal is to reckon with the historical record, to tell the truth as best I can, and leave readers to come to their own decisions. And it's only natural that when confronting a new book on a president, especially on a topic like Roosevelt and Jews that hadn't been covered before, to ask that question that you pose.
- [17:51]
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Andrew Porwancher
Cmnobile.com where what does this do for Roosevelt Standing in our Historical Memory? For readers who may have lionized Roosevelt, who may have overlooked some of his shortcomings, this book will probably Less Roosevelt Standing in their Eyes There are moments where Roosevelt is peddling an anti Semitic trope, or there's a moment where Roosevelt is treating Jews as more of an electoral force rather than treating the the plight of Jews as as a fundamentally moral question. And yet, for readers who might be disposed to think quite ill of Roosevelt, to look at Roosevelt's record on a variety of issues and see him as reactionary or backwards or fundamentally anti modern, I think that this book will actually greatly improve their view of Roosevelt. We see Roosevelt who even in his private correspondence with some of his gentile friends is willing to call out their anti Semitism. We see Theodore Roosevelt, who stands alone on the world stage in his willingness to confront the Czar over the pogroms happening in the Russian Empire. We see a Roosevelt who makes history by elevating a Jew for the first time in our nation's past to a presidential cabinet position. As for myself, I thought I came into this project with a reasonably complex attitude of Roosevelt befitting someone who works professionally as as a scholar of the United States. I left thinking Roosevelt was even more complex than I realized. And I would say, if pressed, that I think Roosevelt comes out to my mind with a better reputation in my eyes than he had going in. I think that that some of the stands Roosevelt was willing to take on behalf of the Jewish community were not politically expedient. And he was under tremendous pressure, particularly from forces inside the State Department, not to go out on a limb for the Jewish community and thereby risk alienating Russia and possibly imperiling American commercial interests with Russia and with Russia controlled courts like Manchuria. And yet Roosevelt does take those defiant stands in ways that are hard not to respect. And so like my book, I'm very much alive to to Roosevelt's faults and his failures. And yet I think that there is much for there's much to be admired in Roosevelt's willingness to stand up for Jews abroad and embrace Jews as part of the American family at home.
- [21:47]
Amber Nichol
Thank you for answering that question, even though I know you didn't want to in the book. And I came out with the same feelings. I went in highly critical of Roosevelt. I still am to a certain extent, but I left kind of with a greater appreciation for who he was as an individual and as a person. There is so much very rich material in this text, and like all authors, I'm assuming you had to make a few cuts along the way. Is there anything you had to cut that you really want to share with listeners today?
- [22:17]
Andrew Porwancher
I'm glad that you asked this question as well, because we often don't have a very good view into people's childhoods. Children tended not to write voluminous correspondence or keep diaries that are preserved after their life. And so oftentimes childhood can be kind of a black box when looking at historical figures. But Roosevelt actually kept a very detailed diary, including during a visit to the Holy Land that he takes in the early 1870s with his family. You know, his family, as I mentioned, was extraordinarily affluent. When these people went on vacation and they didn't go to Florida for a week, they traveled to three different continents over 15 months. And one of these trips, when he's 14 years old, takes him to the Holy Land and he goes to Jerusalem, he goes to the Jordan Valley, he goes to Jaffa, Jericho, Bethlehem, all of these sites of great import in biblical history. And Roosevelt keeps this detailed daily diary. And I was able to really reconstruct his daily happenings. And he importantly for my perspective, looking at the Jewish angle, Roosevelt goes to the Kotel, what's better known as the Western Wall, that last wall outside the Temple, next to the Temple Mount, where Jews to this day still pray over all that was lost when the Romans conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. And Roosevelt writes as a 14 year old about seeing Jews weeping at the wall. Sometimes it was called the Wailing Wall because Jews would. Would weep at the wall. And I ultimately did not get to write at length about Roosevelt's Holy Land experience because the book really begins in earnest with his tenure as head of the New York Police Department. It really begins with him at age 35. But I am working on a companion article about Theodore Roosevelt's adolescent adventure in the Holy Land that I am hoping to come out with in the next year or so. So I do want to give ink and paper to that story. But as you know, there's Such a voluminous historical record that I couldn't include everything. And so while I had to painfully cut that material from the book, I'm still hoping to get it out to readers in another form soon.
- [24:51]
Amber Nichol
I am excited to read the article. Cause that was actually one of the moments. It's just a blip in the book, but I was like, what did he write? Mention he wrote, but what did he write? So I will be definitely reading that article. Well, Andrew, we have taken up quite a bit of time today, and I want to wrap up our interview with my traditional closing question on New Books Network, which is, what are you working on? Now, I know you mentioned the article that's following up on Roosevelt's childhood, but is there another book in the works?
- [25:21]
Andrew Porwancher
To be sure, I am continuing this theme that I started with Hamilton. I've continued with Roosevelt at using Jewish history as a lens to study American democracy with a book that I'm tentatively titling the Great Jewish Lunacy Trial. And this book tells the story of America's first diplomat to Jerusalem, named Warder Cresson. Cresson was born a Quaker in Philadelphia. He is named to be America's first. First diplomat to the holy city in the 1840s. And after four years in Jerusalem, Cresson decides to convert to Judaism. He then goes back home to Philadelphia, where his family has the local county try him for lunacy. And so Cressin is actually subjected to this trial before a jury of his peers. And if the jury deems him to be a lunatic, he will be confined to an asylum, potentially for the rest of his life. And so this case, that was nominally a lunacy case, really rested on whether conversion to Judaism is evidence of insanity. And what contemporary Jews, and Crescent himself well understood was that if a Jew can be deemed a quote, unquote, lunatic just for having adopted the Jewish faith, that this would pose a major obstacle to the free exercise of faith. And what's so interesting is that this case happens in 1851 at a period of time when the Supreme Court had yet to adjudicate a single First Amendment case involving the free exercise clause. At that time, all of the action was in the state courts, and this case assumed national significance. The press was deeply interested in Cresson's fate and what the result of his trial would tell us about whether the free exercise of religion really had purchase on American life, or whether it was an empty promise enshrined in the federal and state constitutions. So I'm really excited to get to be the first person to write a book on Border Crescent and his historic trial, which was of real significance at the time but has slipped into obscurity. And I'm looking forward to getting to explore this I think important but underappreciated aspect of Jewish history that I think can hopefully make a real contribution to our understanding of the American democratic experiment and particularly the role of religion in that endeavor.
- [28:11]
Amber Nichol
Do they find him to be a lunatic?
- [28:15]
Andrew Porwancher
So I'm giving away the plot here, but that's okay. They are, they are. I was kind of careful not to say anything just to entice people, but I. But I. I won't leave your readers in suspense with the good faith understanding that at least consider getting the book when it comes out, which is many years in the offing. But there's an initial trial where he is deemed a lunatic and then on appeal he is acquitted of the charge of lunacy and he ends up going back to the Holy Land where he meets Herman Melville. And Melville actually creates a character in his fiction writing based on Warder Crescent. And so I'm imagining the epilogue of the book exploring Melville's writing about Crescent and sort of plumbing it for insight. So there's an interesting literary perspective there as well.
- [29:04]
Amber Nichol
This sounds amazing and I bet it's going to be thought provoking to write at a time where we're having serious discussions as Americans about the nature of speech and free speech. So I'm really excited to read this one and hopefully interview you in three or four years time, maybe even sooner.
- [29:23]
Andrew Porwancher
I would love that.
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Amber Nichol
Thank you for joining us on new books and Jewish studies today.
- [29:27]
Andrew Porwancher
Andrew, thank you so much, Amber. I really appreciate you having me on and giving me a chance to reach your listeners. And thanks to all of you out there for tuning in and for the.
- [29:38]
Amber Nichol
Listeners out there that were tuning in, if today's discussion piqued your interest, you can pick up a copy of Andrew Poorwancher's American Maccabee, Theodore Roosevelt and the Jews, or the Jewish World of Alexander Hamilton, which I also did an interview on. It's still archived if you want to go back and listen to that one as well. You can get both of these directly from Princeton University Press or your local bookstore.
- [30:14]
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