On Jimmy Carter’s 100th birthday, assessing the 39th president’s record on the Jews
Jimmy Carter at the 1976 Democratic National Convention. Photo by Getty Images
By Benjamin Ivry September 29, 2024
To equitably understand the diverse stances towards Jews of former President Jimmy Carter, whose centenary is celebrated on Oct. 1, a precedent far from the stamping grounds of the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia may be cited. Gallic historians tell us that Napoleon Bonaparte sometimes badmouthed France’s Jews, while also helping them in concrete ways.
In a surprisingly similar way, Jimmy Carter helped launch the Camp David Accords, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and the annual National Menorah lighting ceremony in the nation’s capital. Another legacy of the one-term Carter administration is the Israel Anti-Arab Boycott Act of 1977, which prohibited American companies from cooperating with the Arab boycott by refusing to do business with Israel. And Carter allowed a special visa category to be created to permit tens of thousands of Iranian Jews fleeing the Iranian revolution to find refuge in America while boosting numbers of Soviet Jewish emigres as well.
But Carter also wrote the one-sided polemic Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which blamed all Middle East woes solely on Israel and fudged some basic facts. Worse, an ill-judged sentence in the book implied that terrorism should continue until Israel accepted the goals of the “road map” to peace with Palestinians. About this, Carter later admitted during a book tour to Brandeis University that his wording was “completely improper and stupid” and would be revised in future editions.
On NPR shortly afterwards, Carter again apologized for a “terribly worded sentence which implied, obviously in a ridiculous way, that I approved terrorism and terrorist acts against Israeli citizens.”
Yet Carter never asked his publishers to correct errors of fact in his book, which led 14 Jewish colleagues at the Carter Center to resign from their positions. These former allies criticized Carter for his writing that was “biased, inaccurate, misleading and missing key historical facts.”
Among these was historian Kenneth W. Stein, who castigated Carter for producing a book “replete with factual errors, copied materials not cited, superficialities, glaring omissions, and simply invented segments.”
In the Spring 2007 issue of Middle East Quarterly, Stein further alluded to a previous collaboration with Carter on a book about the Middle East, 1985’s The Blood of Abraham. When a dispute arose over one passage that Stein found inappropriate, Carter smiled at him, saying: “Ken, only one of us was president of the United States.”
This brashness may have been partly to blame when, as was revealed later, Monroe Freedman, former executive director of the government’s Holocaust Memorial Council, compiled a list of potential members only to have Carter respond that there were “too many Jews” on it. Even an unnamed Presbyterian Holocaust scholar was excluded because his name “sounded too Jewish.”
Was this an attempt to assemble a multi-faith collaboration or one weighted towards Carter’s own brand of born-again Christianity (he preferred the emotional term “Holy Land” to the more secular “Middle East”)? In any case, Freedman described himself as “outraged by this absurdity” and denied that it was “inappropriate to build a Holocaust council with a significant majority of the board being Jewish.”
In 2007, Neal Sher, a Justice Department lawyer who helped deport dozens of Nazis from the US, told Israel National Radio about a comparably odd episode two decades earlier. Former president Carter had intervened in the case of Martin Bartesch, an SS guard at Mauthausen concentration camp. There, in 1943, Bartesch murdered Gottfried Ochshorn, a Jewish prisoner who was trying to escape. By lying on his immigration papers about his SS past, Bartesch lived undisturbed as a janitor in postwar Chicago, until the U.S. Office of Special Investigations caught up with him in 1987. Then he was deported to Austria. Bartesch’s daughters, who remained in the USA, appealed to politicians to allow their father to return, and Jimmy Carter added a handwritten note requesting “special consideration” for the Nazi murderer, for “humanitarian reasons.”
Continuing until recent years to insert himself into discussions on the Middle East with his usual verve, in 2015 Carter told HuffPost Live that French Jews should not consider moving to Israel for their own safety, despite the explosion of antisemitic violence in that country, because Jews “on the average” are “maybe safer in France than some places in Israel.” Carter quickly added the caveat: “but I’m not trying to make a judgment,” raising the question of why he bothered saying it, if not to express a judgment?
Looking on the bright side, Carter went on to mention that the November 2015 Paris attacks offered an opportunity for the West to discover what makes Islam “great”: “I think this is going to give a lot of people incentive to look into Islamicism, what is it about this religion that makes it great, that makes it appeal to really billions of people,” he said.
French Jews may be pardoned for not sharing this silver lining amidst the horrors of life in their homeland. Likewise, Carter’s absolute faith in unreliable negotiators like Hamas, which he deemed worthy to join peace talks, was somehow strengthened by his ironclad religious belief.
As an example, on the fourth night of Hanukkah in 1979, with advisor Stuart Eizenstat, author of an account of his presidency, Carter expressed these convictions when he lit the shamash candle which is used to light the other candles of the Hanukkah menorah. Carter spoke to the assembled crowd, alluding to the story in the Second Book of Maccabees about how a small quantity of oil to light the ancient Temple’s menorah miraculously lasted eight days.
Then Carter uttered with the certainty of his Baptist faith: “This miracle showed that God meets our needs. If we depend on Him, He will meet our needs.” The notion of an all-providing deity just 35 years after the Holocaust devastated European Jewry suggests an optimism bordering on irreality.
Elsewhere, Carter’s reflections on Jews, especially when teaching Sunday school, could be equally dicey. Stuart Eizenstat observed that during his presidency, Carter continued to teach Bible classes, later released in audiobook form. During one, he stated that Jesus “directly challenged in a fatal way the existing church, and there was no possible way for the Jewish leaders to avoid the challenge. So they decided to kill Jesus.”
Carter reiterated this calumny of Jews as Christ-killers, the basis for centuries of antisemitic persecution, in yet another Sunday school lesson about how Jesus was aware that he was risking death “as quickly as [it] could be arranged by the Jewish leaders, who were very powerful.”
Even more than such missteps, his faith in the integrity and reliability of the terrorist group Hamas irked some observers, like the Atlanta Jewish Times, which in a 2015 editorial deemed Carter a “parasite.” In response, Carter refused to be interviewed by any journalist from that periodical.
But such squabbles aside, during his time in office and after, Jimmy Carter accomplished a myriad of positive things for Jews and others in America and overseas, for which gratitude is the appropriate response on this centenary.
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