A scion of the Protes­tant elite, Theodore Roo­sevelt was an unlike­ly ally of the waves of impov­er­ished Jew­ish new­com­ers who crowd­ed the docks at Ellis Island. Yet from his ear­li­est years he forged ties with Jews nev­er before wit­nessed in a pres­i­dent. Amer­i­can Mac­cabee traces Roo­sevelt’s deep con­nec­tion with the Jew­ish peo­ple at every step of his daz­zling ascent. But it also reveals a man of con­tra­dic­tions whose check­ered approach to Jew­ish issues was no less con­flict­ed than the nation he led.

As a ris­ing polit­i­cal fig­ure in New York, Roo­sevelt barn­stormed the Low­er East Side, giv­ing speech­es to packed halls of Jew­ish immi­grants. He ral­lied for reform of the sweat­shops where Jew­ish labor­ers toiled for piti­ful wages in per­ilous con­di­tions. And Roo­sevelt repeat­ed­ly ven­er­at­ed the hero­ism of the Mac­cabee war­riors, uphold­ing those sto­ried rebels as a mod­el for the Amer­i­can Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty. Yet lit­tle could have pre­pared him for the blood-soaked per­se­cu­tion of East­ern Euro­pean Jews that brought a del­uge of refugees to Amer­i­can shores dur­ing his pres­i­den­cy. Andrew Por­wanch­er uncov­ers the vex­ing chal­lenges for Roo­sevelt as he con­front­ed Jew­ish suf­fer­ing abroad and anti­se­mit­ic xeno­pho­bia at home.

Draw­ing on new archival research to paint a rich­ly nuanced por­trait of an icon­ic fig­ure, Amer­i­can Mac­cabee chron­i­cles the com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship between the leader of a youth­ful nation and the peo­ple of an ancient faith.