That’s Not Kosher: How Four Jewish Butchers Brought Down the First New Deal
2nd June 2012
It was the Roosevelt administration’s prosecution of the Schechters for violating the [fascist] National Industrial Recovery Act, one of the pillars of the New Deal, that led the Supreme Court to declare the act unconstitutional in 1935. FDR was, and remains, so beloved by American Jews that the heroism of the Schechters has been lost as a story of Jewish moral commitment in the face of power. In her history of the Great Depression, The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes begins the process of rescuing the Schechter brothers from obscurity by spending an entire chapter on their challenge to the New Deal. In this article I build on Shlaes’s account to provide some broader context for their story and draw some implications for Jewish Americans.
June 4th, 2012 at 13:06
Seems like we’ve gone from “Congress shall make no law …” to “Congress shall do whatever it d*mn well pleases to get itself reelected by purchasing votes with taxpayer money.”