Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown is the story of Japanese American patriots fighting for the U.S. in World War II while their parents and siblings were incarcerated in concentration (euphemistically termed relocation) camps in the West and South. In this intensely moving and deeply researched narrative, Brown lays out in grueling detail the feats of the 442^nd Infantry Regiment of the U.S. Army, brave men of Japanese ancestry, most of them United States citizens, on the front lines in bloody battles in Italy and in the Vosges mountains. (Officers of the infantry regiment were White.)  In mountainous terrain heavily fortified by the Nazis, they pulled of a seemingly impossible rescue of a surrounded Texas regiment. Just two dozen of hundreds of members of the 442nd were able to walk out.

Whether living in Hawaii or on the mainland, Japanese-Americans were discriminated against as “Japs.” In the wake of Pearl Harbor, they were rounded up, deprived of their liberty, stripped of their property and jobs and relocated to concentration camps.  The Nissei (children born in America to Japanese immigrants) had to fight for the right to enlist, to prove their loyalty. Their heroism was singular. The 442^nd became the most decorated unit in U.S. military history. Still, when they returned home after years of service, they returned to the same racism they had left. 

There was also heroism on the home front. One brave civilian, Gordon Hirabayashi, a Quaker conscientious objector who remained stateside fighting for civil rights, paid for his principled stance with several terms in prison. Sadly, anti-Asian discrimination endures- as do the messages of this marvelous book. We can learn much from reading it.

Nazis of Copley Square: the Forgotten History of the Christian Front by Charles R. Gallagher resonates acutely with today’s rise of anti-Semitism in the United States and globally.  Gallagher, a priest and professor of history at Boston College, probes deeply into the dark narrative of the Catholic Front.  The group, which found a home in Boston in 1939 and the early forties, was heavily influenced by the vitriol of Detroit priest and radio personality Father Charles Edward Coughlin. The Front had its theological roots in the canard that Jews killed Christ. It rallied around the need to defeat godless Communism (and its Judeo-Bolshevik adherents). The demagoguery blossomed into lethality with full-throated embrace of anti-Semitic tropes still present today.

Criminal trials of New York leaders of the Front failed to end with convictions. In Boston, the local head of the Front, Francis Moran, conspired with German Consul and Nazi spy Herbert Wilhelm Scholz to weaponize anti-Semitic propaganda and whip up crowds, made up largely of Irish Catholics, who attacked Jews in the streets and vandalized their businesses and synagogues. The Nazi flag flew proudly outside the German consulate on Chestnut Street in Beacon Hill.

An underlying Front goal was to keep the United States out of WWII on the British side. Counteracting its efforts to generate support for Germany was liberal Irish-Catholic activist and journalist Frances Sweeney, leading the fight against anti-Semitism. The Brits, for their part, also had an intelligence operation in Boston, having infiltrated the Irish American Defense Association, housed in the Little Building at 80 Boylston Street in Boston. The Front’s violence reached its peak late in 1943, then slowly faded from the front pages. But it took two decades before Catholics and Jews institutionalized ways of working together collaboratively on human rights issues, aided by Pope John’s 1965 encyclical officially exonerating Jews from charges of deicide.

Gallagher’s scrupulously documented narrative is a page-turner that remains a cautionary tale of hate-filled events that planted the seeds for today’s Christian Nationalist right-wing activities.

How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer is a provocative book about how leftists have failed to achieve their goals by prioritizing identity politics.  DeBoer, a self-described Marxist, can be off-putting, but he points out some truths that have received inadequate attention in an era of hyper-wokeness and political correctness.  Far more effective, he says, is to accomplish progressive ends by prioritizing economic issues rather than dwelling on linguistic issues that may make some people feel better but have little to no impact on materially improving their lives.

DeBoer looks at the Occupy, BLM, and MeToo movements, what they initially gained, and how their early power was not sustained due to organizational weaknesses and what he claims are too-narrow constituencies.  In criticizing the left, DeBoer completely ignores gains made by the labor movement and the Biden Administration’s programmatic accomplishments, achieved despite the jiujitsu of language politics and atomized constituent groups.  DeBoer’s assertions are not always backed up by metrics, but the thoughtful parts of his analysis are almost certain to provoke healthy discussion. A better book dealing with these issues may be Yascha Mounk’s The Identity Trap.

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