Join us for the Jewish Book Festival on December 17 to hear Lew Paper

Lew Paper, author of In the Cauldron, will be the featured speaker at the Jewish Book Festival event on Thursday, Dec. 17 at 1 p.m. Paper’s articles have appeared in many publications, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. A former adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, Paper has authored five other books. Generously sponsored by Men’s Cultural Alliance, this event is offered at no charge.

Lew Paper

To register to receive the Zoom link, please go to the order form in the Federation’s Monday e-blasts and on the book festival website at www.JewishBook Festival.org.

In the meantime, enjoy this review of In the Cauldron by Jewish Book Festival Committee member, Irene Pomerantz.

In the Cauldron, by Lew Paper

A 23-year-old hunter facing the shining green eyes and deep-throated growl of a tiger in a dark cave in Southeast Asia is the focus of Lew Paper’s latest book about the attack on Pearl Harbor. The adventure of killing the tiger would be the impetus that set Joseph Grew on his career as a diplomat and decade-long tour as ambassador to Japan from 1932 to Dec. 8, 1941, when he and his embassy staff were interned there until his repatriation to the United States in August 1942. Lew Paper

Using many primary sources, including letters, official papers, diplomatic archives, interviews and the diary of Grew, Paper unfolds the life and career of Grew and his many failed diplomatic attempts to find conciliation between Japan and the United States. He incorporates into this drama the background and anecdotes of other important people, both American and Japanese.

As Japan increased its military activities in China and Southeast Asia, and even sank the USS Panay on patrol in the Yangtze River, instead of a military response, the United States’ answer was to impose tariffs on Japanese products while refusing to send essential materials to Japan. Those tariffs had a direct effect on the deterioration of people’s lives: all goods were enormously curtailed and people were poverty-stricken. Despite the appeals of England and Grew for the U.S. to send a portion of its Pacific fleet as a show of force against Japan’s aggression, President Franklin Roosevelt’s response remained staunchly opposed.

What the U.S. failed to understand was the Japanese mindset, of which Grew increasingly became aware. The Japanese people viewed their emperor, Hirohito, as a descendant of the Sun Goddess and, therefore, a living god, one who could not even be looked upon from windows during the empire’s 2,600th birthday celebration on the palace grounds. The people believed that to die for the emperor was a soldier’s greatest glory. Western laws and treaties did not coincide with Japanese thinking. They increasingly developed biases against Westerners, even attacking a U.S. attaché.

Grew developed a relationship with Matsuoka Yosuke, Japan’s Foreign Minister, from July 1940 to July 1941. After establishment of the Tripartite Pact of Japan, Germany and Italy, Grew, through Matsuoka, received several warnings about Japan’s intention to unleash formidable new weapons against the U.S. if it became involved in the European conflict. Even in late fall 1940, Matsuoka revealed Japan’s intention to attack American soldiers in Pearl Harbor. The U.S. military deemed Matsuoka insane. Grew’s communiqués never made it beyond State Department Secretary of State Cordell Hull. And although Grew knew FDR from school, he respected the chain of command.

Paper has succeeded in an engaging manner to deftly unfold the dayto-day accounting of the events leading up to what the reader already knows is the attack on Pearl Harbor.