Nazi collaborator and American artist Gertrude Stein was among Jewish Americans praised in a White House announcement yesterday proclaiming Jewish Heritage Month.
The inclusion, noted by Algemeiner.com, in its original released form read, "Their history of unbroken perseverance and their belief in tomorrow’s promise offers a lesson not only to Jewish Americans, but to all Americans. From Aaron Copland to Albert Einstein, Gertrude Stein to Justice Louis Brandeis."
Stein was a supporter and collaborator with the Nazis' Vichy regime in France, according to Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, who has criticized a current Stein art exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
According to Barbara Will, author of "Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Fay and the Vichy Dilemma," Stein survived the Vichy regime because she was a strong supporter of the Nazis, publicly proclaiming her support of Adolf Hitler and proposing him for a Nobel Peace Prize in the mid-1930s.
She considered Gen. Phillipe Petain, the Nazi puppet who deported thousands of Jews, to be a French hero, and she volunteered to write an introduction to an English translation of his speeches so Americans could see the virtues of the Vichy government.
Dershowitz adds, "Stein’s closest friend, and a man who greatly influenced her turn toward fascism was Bernard Fay, who the Vichy government put in charge of hunting down Masons, Jews and other perceived enemies of the State. ... After the war, when the horrendous results were known to all, Gertrude wrote in support of Fay when he was placed on trial for his Nazi war crimes."
A White House official said the proclamation issued yesterday was an early draft that was mistakenly released. That was replaced with a new version that does not mention Stein, but the original remained on the White House website for several hours.
It's hard to fathom how even a "draft" of a proclamation for Jewish Heritage Month includes a Nazi collaborator in the first place. It's as if the White House press staff just opened up a book of famous Jewish names at random and said let's take this one, without even reading the most basic biographical information about the person.
Or is this another example of the White House's blind eye?
In a regime strongly sponsored by George Soros, whose first job was delivering eviction notices to Jews for the Nazis, it would not be surprising. According to the Ottawa Sun, as a teen Soros worked for the Judenrat, the Jewish council set up by the Nazis to round up Jews for the trains to the concentration camps. Asked by Steve Kroft of "60 Minutes" if he had any regrets about those activities, Soros replied, "There was no sense that I shouldn’t be there. If I wasn’t doing it, somebody else would be taking it away anyhow. Whether I was there or not. So I had no sense of guilt."
Then there is the matter of the commander-in-chief's decades-long acquaintance with the racist pastor Jeremiah Wright, during which President Obama claims to have noticed nothing unusual about Wright's opinions. After Obama publicly distanced himself from Wright, the pastor said in an interview, "Them Jews ain't going to let him talk to me."
Since taking office, President Obama has often been notably cold toward Israel and openly sympathetic toward the Palestinians and other Muslim groups that would see Israel wiped off the Earth if they had their druthers.
Perhaps the proclamation praising Stein was just a mistake, or perhaps it was a case of "trickle-down" racism.