By Rabbi Rachel Esserman

When I took American history classes in high school, several aspects of our past were ignored. We never learned about the restraints placed on Jewish immigration to the U.S., even when it became clear how dangerous it was to be Jewish in Europe before and during World War II. We also never learned that, once the U.S. entered the war, Japanese-Americans on the West Coast were ordered to sell their homes and possessions, and report to the American concentration camps (which is what those camps were called at that time). This included Japanese-American citizens and their non-citizen relatives, many of whom had been in the U.S. for years, but were not allowed to become American citizens no matter how long they lived here. 
These thoughts arose while reading “Together in Manzanar: The True Story of a Japanese Jewish Family in an American Concentration Camp” by Tracy Slater (Chicago Review Press). These camps were later referred to as detention camps since the term concentration camps came to reference Nazi death camps. Why is the detention of those who might have sided with America’s enemy problematic? It might not have been if German or Italian Americans had been also sent to camps. However, that didn’t happen: only someone with Japanese lineage, no matter how minor, was considered a potential enemy. 
Slater’s work focuses on Elaine Buchman Yoneda and her husband, Karl, although the author explores others who were in the camps. Although Elaine was Jewish, her family was not religious. Or, rather, Elaine’s religion was the support of labor and progressive movements. That is what drew her and Karl together: both were firm anti-fascists. Although Elaine was not required to leave her home, her half-Japanese, 3-year-old son, Tommy, who suffered from health issues, was. Elaine had to fight to accompany him. That choice may not have been easy: Elaine had an older daughter from a first marriage whom she had to leave with her parents. 
Karl was already at Manzanar when Elaine and Tommy arrived. Housing at the camp was sub-par with no heat and little protection from the sun. Multiple families were crowded together in small spaces, giving them little privacy and helping the spread of illness. Karl had volunteered to help build the camp because he wanted to prove to the authorities that he was a loyal American citizen. His dream was to become a soldier so he could fight Japanese fascism, which he deplored. This led to his and Elaine’s downplaying the civil rights violations that were taking place since they felt fighting against fascism in Japan and Europe was more important.
Not everyone accepted their treatment. Of particular interest is Joe Kurihara, a World War I veteran who had been extremely proud of his service to the U.S. He rightly called their detention “false imprisonment” and, by the end of the war, renounced his American citizenship, even though he knew no Japanese and had never visited Japan. He and others protested against those Japanese who were cooperating with the military running the camps. They also condemned the conditions under which they were forced to live, especially the fences surrounding the camps and the armed guards keeping them inside. These differences of opinions later led to violence, leaving those – like Elaine – who cooperated with the authorities in fear of their lives.
One interesting note is that the American military and the Japanese had negative opinions of Jews. Slater quotes from a textbook used at West Point and the Army War College at that time. According to that book, “Eastern European Jews were cast as low as – or even lower than – Asians. At the War College, the assigned text... argued that modern Jews were actually an Asian hybrid race with Mongoloid traits and inherited tendencies that would one day lead them to destroy America’s cherished institutions.” Some of the Japanese in the camps claimed that “Roosevelt was a Jew, and Jews hate the Japanese.” Other Asians were also considered beneath them: a Korean living in the camp was referred to as a “dog.”
What is clear is that Elaine and Karl felt that winning the war against fascism was more important than civil rights (and she is quoted as specifically stating that) since they feared what would happen if the U.S. lost. Obviously, others did not feel the same : they saw the camps – which they considered prisons – as a blot on America’s claims of equality, especially since only those with Asian ancestry were considered potential enemies, while white Europeans (German and Italian Americans) were not. 
The prose in “Together in Manzanar” is blunt and easy to read. The work reads more as journalism than history: that is not a complaint, but rather shows how Slater makes what occurred feel real and immediate. The book does not contain a great deal of Jewish content, but it does include a Jewish woman readers will be proud to meet – one who volunteered to live in a camp rather than abandon her son. While this complicated her daughter’s life (details are more sparse about her, but her adult life was not a happy one), this fierce Jewish mother worked to protect her son, sometimes at the risk of her own life.