10/18/2026
Long before New York’s La Guardia airport was built, Fiorello La Guardia, former mayor of New York, was an American icon. What many don’t realize is that the maverick leader was Jewish and his family’s Holocaust experience impacted his vociferous response to Hi**er.
Born in Greenwich Village, New York, Fiorello Enrico Raeffaelo La Guardia was the son of Achille La Guardia, a lapsed Catholic native of Cerignola, Italy, and Irene Luzzatto Coen, a Jewish native of Trieste, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Enrico was eventually anglicized to Henry. Fiorello is Italian for little flower which is how the great leader was often referred.
Through his mother, La Guardia was a descendant of Rabbi Samuel David Luzzatto, a famous Italian leader of the Neo-Orthodoxy movement and a collateral descendant of the great kabbalist Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto. Neither parent practiced their religion, but a Jewish pride was instilled deep inside. Little La Guardia was even taught to recite Shema Yisrael before bedtime by his mother3. La Guardia’s Jewish roots would not be widely known to the public until after he was elected Mayor of New York. No matter what his parents practiced, Fiorello Henry La Guardia was born a Jew.
After having trouble securing steady work in New York and then Arizona, Achille La Guardia moved the family back to Europe. It was here that young Fiorello would get his first taste of government, working in the US Consulate in Budapest. With higher ambitions, the little flower left his family behind and returned to his native New York in 1906 with an eye on politics.
After graduating from NYU School of Law in 1910 and a failed bid for US Representative in 1914, La Guardia was appointed Deputy Attorney General of New York in 1915. The next year, a second congressional bid would prove successful. In 1919 he narrowly won victory in a special election for President of the New York City Board of Aldermen, New York City’s unicameral legislature that was active until 1937. He resigned from Congress to take this position. In 1921 he made his first bid at the mayorship, but lost in the Republican primary.
In 1922, he ran again against Henry Frank, a Jew, in a bid to return to Congress in Washington. In classical political mudslinging, Frank accused LaGuardia of being an antisemite. La Guardia responded by dictating an open letter to the Jewish community in Yiddish, and challenged Frank to a debate in the mama lashon. La Guardia was fluent in Yiddish; Frank wasn’t. He declined the invitation. Fiorello won and returned to Congress where he served until 1933. In 1929, he won his party’s nomination for Mayor of New York, but was defeated in the general election.
At this time in American politics, the rock-solid association of Republicans as Conservatives and Democrats as Liberals had not yet taken place. This realignment would not happen until President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal Coalition which would become the dominant force of the Democratic Party until the 60s. The Conservative Coalition would take the reins of the Republican Party during the same time. During the realignment, many personalities moved back and forth between and within the parties. While La Guardia was a card-carrying Republican his whole life, he was so deeply allied with the President that he even held a quasi-cabinet level position for some time as the Director of the Office of Civilian Defense. He entered congress at the end of the Progressive Era of American politics and worked to keep the candle burning until it was championed by President Roosevelt in 1933.
La Guardia finally made it to City Hall propelled as a “Fusion Candidate” with the support of Republicans, reform minded Democrats, and Independents. He appealed to previously underrepresented groups in New York such as Italian Catholics, Jews, Protestants, and Backs. Through his three terms and 12 years in office, La Guardia’s fingerprints are all over New York City until this day. As an architect and champion of the New Deal, he oversaw $1.1 billion pumped into the city. These funds led to the building of The West Side Highway, East River Drive, Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, Triborough Bridge, both of the city’s airports, and to major improvements in the city’s subway system.
At the same time that America was trying to climb out of the Great Depression, many were alarmed by the rise of the N***s in Germany, but few raised their voices. A noted exception was Fiorello Henry La Guardia. The US Secretary of State at the time of the N**i ascent was Cordell Hull who, until Kristallnacht, tried tirelessly to reconcile the differences between Germany and America. La Guardia was a frequent thorn in the side. In June 1933, six months before assuming the mayorship, he was a keynote speaker at the National Conference Against Racial Persecution in Germany. In his speech he called Hi**er “a perverted maniac” and that “part of his program is the complete annihilation of the Jews in Germany.” He even came out in favor of a boycott of German goods in New York.
La Guardia was first publicly “outed” as a Jew by the N***s just before his swearing in as Mayor. His Jewish roots had not been publicly known or discussed. The Mayor-elect shrugged off the event saying, “I never thought I had enough Jewish blood in my veins to justify boasting about it.” Hans Luther, the German Ambassador to the US, regularly visited the Secretary of State and demanded that the “troublesome mayor” be silenced. The little flower would continue to put the full weight of City Hall against the N***s long before most others in America were ready to do so.
La Guardia stood up to the N***s long before anyone else was ready to. In July 1935, a German immigrant named Paul Kress applied for a masseur’s licence in New York. Under America’s “Treaty of Friendship” with Germany, the craftsman’s German licence should have been recognized in the US. La Guardia reduced the licence. “Treaties are based on reciprocity. It is well known that American citizens of the Jewish faith have been discriminated against in Germany. That being the case, I cannot see how the German Government can insist upon alleged rights contained in the treaty on which they now rely.”
The Jewish community saw a Mayor who was standing up for their European co-religionists—not because they were Jews, but because it was the right thing to do. They loved him for it, and would continue to vote for him again and again.
Read the full article: https://aish.com/fiorella-la-guardias-jewish-roots/
