Jewish Wives of Non-Jews

YOU WOULD HAVE to be blind, deaf and dumb not to be aware of the Jewish ascendancy in the US. But one aspect of Jewish power has never been adequately weighed and investigated — Jewish wives.

The number of Jewesses married to non-Jews is not inconsiderable. We were reminded of it in a recent book by Peggy Dennis, the wife of Eugene Dennis, longtime head of the American Communist Party. Peggy Dennis is Jewish, as were or are many wives of non-Jewish Communist officials. Earl Browder, head of the Party during the critical World War 2 and pre-World-War-2 years, had a Jewish wife. The chances are that the better half of Gus Hall, 1970s Party chief, is not a Gentile.

Non-Jewish officials of the American labor movement also are known to have frequently married Jewesses. The case that comes prominently to mind is that of the Jewish wife of Walter Reuther, late head of the United Auto Workers.

As for non-Jewish Communists elsewhere, Molotov had a Jewish wife, as had Gomulka, the postwar dictator of Poland. Brezhnev may have had a Jewish wife. Older Bolsheviks grew up in a thoroughly Jewish ambiance — one that began with Marx and did not disappear until the latter days of Stalin. Even Stalin himself was supposed to have had a Jewish wife, but this was vehemently denied by his refugee daughter, Svetlana, who herself had a Jewish husband or two.

In England some distinguished aristocratic families have Jews in their family trees — notably the Mountbattens. Female Rothschilds have married non-Jews in both France and Britain, as have female Guggenheims, female Schiffs, female Warburgs, female Meyers, and female Sulzbergers in this country. Probably the greatest agglomeration of Jewish wives is to be found in the arts and social sciences.

Almost every prominent non-Jewish refugee from Hitler’s Germany had a Jewish spouse or mistress — Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Berthold Brecht, Paul Hindemith, Walter Gropius, to name a few.

Andre Malraux, De Gaulle’s cultural factotum, married a Jewess during his ultraleft period. Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist, has been falsely called a Jew by Nathaniel Weyl, apparently because he wedded one.

It is hard to assess the influence Jewish wives have exerted on their non-Jewish husbands. The writer of this article has known a few mixed marriages of this type where the Jewish wife has more or less swallowed her Jewishness and where the husband has actually shown signs of anti-Jewish thoughts. James Cozzens, married to a Jewess, wrote what might be termed a quasi-anti-Semitic novel, By Love Possessed. John Cheever, another American author with a Jewish wife, has not been known to be an outspoken Semitist.

One of the most publicized mixed marriages was that of Katharine Meyer, daughter of Eugene Meyer, owner of the Washington Post, to the brilliant young Majority lawyer, Philip Graham. After Meyer’s death, Graham took over control of his father-in-law’s publishing empire, while Katharine took a back seat. Here was a non-Jewish husband inheriting one of the world’s leading newspapers by marriage. But as Graham rose higher and higher in the power structure, at one time even becoming a close advisor of Lyndon Johnson, his mind was reported to be giving way. He actually began to berate his wife for being Jewish. Not long afterward, his body was found in an isolated corner of the family estate in Virginia. A suicide? That’s what the coroner said. In a few months Katharine assumed direct control of the Washington Post Company.

The Jewish wives of non-Jewish Europeans made it mandatory that they try to escape the long arm of Hitler during the war, although the famous geopolitical wizard Haushofer remained comfortably and safely in National Socialist Germany with his Jewish wife.

The Jewish wives of current Soviet politicians probably exert very little influence. The anti-Zionism of their spouses seems to increase with each passing day.

In the economic field Jewish wives bring along that all-important ingredient known as money. In the arts they probably have some indirect clout because of their family connections to producers, directors, publishers, and agents. There is an old proverb that she who advances careers controls them.

The great and lasting influence of the Jewish wife, however, is exerted through her half-Jewish children. In Talmudic law the offspring of a Jewish mother are Jewish, no matter who the father is. The Jewish mother is consequently under a kind of historical compulsion to make her offspring favor the Jewish component of their inheritance. If she forgets, she will probably be forcefully reminded of her duty by a watchful rabbi.

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Source: based on an article in Instauration magazine, March 1979