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Kissinger’s total repudiation of his beloved father’s Orthodox faith is perhaps best characterized by critics’ acerbic and cynical reference to “the three S’s:” he married a shiksa (the disparaging word for a non-Jewish woman) on Shabbat while serving shrimp.
He further distanced himself from Judaism through bitter and revolting quips, such as his observation that “Were it not for the accident of my birth, I would be an anti-Semite;” his asking “Is there a more self-serving group of people than the Jewish community?”; and his monumentally despicable remark that “Any people who have been persecuted for 2,000 years must be doing something wrong.”
Kissinger was viewed by many as a self-hating Jew who turned on his father and his people by consistently acting in a manner inimical to Jewish interests. This behavior is reflected in his stance on Soviet Jewry; his reaction to the UN’s “Zionism is racism” resolution; his position vis-à-vis Israel; and his approach to the Holocaust.
First, Kissinger argued vociferously that it was not in America’s interests to put pressure on the Soviet Union or to intercede on behalf of persecuted Soviet Jews. In a conversation with Nixon shortly after a March 1, 1973 meeting with Golda Meir in which the Israeli prime minister pleaded the cause of Soviet Jews, he essentially argued that the possibility of a second Holocaust should not be an American concern:
The emigration of Jews from the Soviet Union is not an objective of American foreign policy, and if they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern.
At the time of Golda’s visit, the American public had manifested broad support for the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which sought to refocus American foreign policy away from Kissinger’s favored détente and toward a program promoting human rights. Threatened by the Soviet Jewry movement and furious at having his infallible foreign policy smarts challenged, Kissinger blamed the Jews, advising Nixon that in selfishly looking out for the interests of their people they were “behaving unconscionably” and “traitorously” in sabotaging American interests.
Second, Kissinger (by then serving under President Ford) undermined UN Ambassador Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s impassioned and noble crusade against the “Zionism is racism” resolution. The secretary of state mocked Moynihan by patronizingly and sarcastically explaining to him that “we are conducting foreign policy; this is not a synagogue.” (America ultimately voted against the resolution, which was adopted by the United Nations on November 10, 1975, and repealed in 1991).
Third, even during his Harvard days, Kissinger is reported to have strongly opposed the creation of Israel, arguing that the existence of a Jewish state was inconsistent with American interests. Much of the controversy over Kissinger’s lack of support for Israel revolves around the turbulent events that began with the 1973 Yom Kippur War when, after strongly opposing the military re-supply of Israel (he was subsequently overruled by Nixon) and actively interfering with the flow of support to Israel, he negotiated the end to that war by forcing Israel to let the Egyptian Third Army escape and by pressuring – some, including Golda Meir, say bullying – Israel to cede back to the Arabs land it had captured during the war at great cost.
Fourth, upon his first visit to Israel as secretary of state, Kissinger refused to visit Yad Vashem until he was advised that other foreign ministers routinely did so. During a visit with his parents to his native Fürth, he remained conspicuously silent about the Holocaust, making no mention of his fellow Jews who were not as lucky as he to escape (only 18 of Fürth’s 3,000 Jews survived Hitler). He later compounded this disgrace by strongly supporting Ronald Reagan’s visit to Bitburg, when the president laid a wreath at a German military cemetery where members of the SS were buried. He was also against the construction of the United States Holocaust Museum, arguing that building the edifice on federal land would call undue attention to American Jews.
