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By LANCE J. SUSSMAN<\/p>\n
(Jewish Ideas Daily) – I loved\u00a0“Lincoln”\u00a0as much as anyone and, as an American historian, took a special pleasure in it.\u00a0Among many other things, I thought the depiction of Thaddeus Stevens was terrific. As the father of fivechildren, all of whom grew up in the post-“E.T.”\u00a0era, I am grateful to Steven Spielberg for having supplied my family with countless hours of great entertainment.\u00a0As someone descended, in part, from Jews forced to leave Germany in the 1930s and as a rabbi, I especially respect the work he did on “Schindler\u2019s List”\u00a0and his creation of the Steven Spielberg Jewish Film Archive.<\/p>\n
But as an American Jewish historian, I’m afraid I have to say I am somewhat disappointed with the latest Spielberg film. So much of it is so good, but it would have been even better if he had put at least one Jew in the movie, somewhere.<\/p>\n
He has done it before.\u00a0Not everyone remembers (as I do, having seen it with one child after another) Spielberg\u2019s 1985 adventure-comedy “Goonies,” but no one who does can forget \u201cChunk\u201d Cohen.\u00a0 And, of course, there is Pvt. Stanley Mellish, who in\u00a0“Saving Private Ryan” taunts German POWs with the loud announcement that he\u2019s a Jewish soldier.\u00a0 So couldn\u2019t Spielberg have done something like that in\u00a0“Lincoln”?<\/p>\n
He had a lot of options.\u00a0 In the very beginning of\u00a0“Lincoln,” for instance, Spielberg briefly depicts the Battle of Jenkins\u2019 Ferry and has two U.S. Colored Troops talk about it.\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t they have said something about\u00a0Gen. Frederick C. Salomon, one of the Union commanders in this engagement, who was also a Jewish immigrant from Prussia?<\/p>\n
Then there\u2019s the telegraph office at the War Department, where some of the most engaging and entertaining episodes in the movie take place.\u00a0 Couldn\u2019t Spielberg have shown Lincoln chatting there with\u00a0Edward Rosewater\u00a0(nee Rosenwasser, in Bohemia), the twentysomething telegraph operator who sent out the Emancipation Proclamation from that very office on Jan. 1, 1863?\u00a0 True, he was out of Washington and resettled in Omaha, Neb., by early 1865, when almost all of the action in the movie occurs.\u00a0 But if Spielberg had smuggled him in two years off\u00a0schedule, who would have noticed apart from the historians who have been busy documenting the minor inaccuracies in “Lincoln” in small-circulation journals?<\/p>\n
Much of “Lincoln” depicts life in the family quarters of the White House. \u00a0Couldn\u2019t we have been given a glimpse of\u00a0Isachar Zacharie\u00a0there?\u00a0 An English Jewish\u00a0podiatrist\u00a0who had been recommended to Lincoln by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton,\u00a0 Zacharie was someone who \u201cenjoyed Mr. Lincoln’s confidence perhaps more than any other private individual,\u201d according to a Sept. 24, 1864 editorial in the\u00a0New York World,\u00a0and was \u201cperhaps the most favored family visitor at the White House.\u201d I\u2019m not sure that Dr. Zacharie made any White House calls during precisely the months depicted in\u00a0Lincoln, but\u00a0we do have evidence that he corresponded with the president around this time, and the poetic license involved in putting him on the scene would not have been very great at all.<\/p>\n
Spielberg omitted these people, I have to admit, without really detracting in any way from the quality of his outstanding film, which is truly a great American movie.\u00a0 From the Jewish point of view, however,\u00a0“Lincoln”\u00a0represents a missed opportunity \u2014 an opportunity to inform a broader public (including far too many Jews) that Jews didn\u2019t just show up in the United States after pogrom-makers began torching their neighborhoods in the Russian Pale of Settlement.\u00a0 We were here a considerable amount of time before that playing significant parts in the nation\u2019s life.<\/p>\n
(Lance J. Sussman, Ph.D., is senior rabbi of the Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, Pa. He is the author of\u00a0“Isaac Leeser and the Making of American Judaism”\u00a0and has lectured widely on American Jews and the Civil War.\u00a0<\/em>This article was first published by\u00a0Jewish\u00a0Ideas\u00a0Daily [www.jewishideasdaily.com<\/a>] and is reprinted with permission.<\/em>)<\/em><\/p>\n