The Jews Should Keep Quiet

The Jews Should Keep Quiet PDF Author: Rafael Medoff
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0827618301
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

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Book Description
Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's fateful policies during the Holocaust. Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR's consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away--actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war. What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president's private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt's statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration's policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans. The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR's personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry's foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR's policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration's realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.

The Jews Should Keep Quiet

The Jews Should Keep Quiet PDF Author: Rafael Medoff
Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
ISBN: 0827618301
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 497

Get Book Here

Book Description
Based on recently discovered documents, The Jews Should Keep Quiet reassesses the hows and whys behind the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration's fateful policies during the Holocaust. Rafael Medoff delves into difficult truths: With FDR's consent, the administration deliberately suppressed European immigration far below the limits set by U.S. law. His administration also refused to admit Jewish refugees to the U.S. Virgin Islands, dismissed proposals to use empty Liberty ships returning from Europe to carry refugees, and rejected pleas to drop bombs on the railways leading to Auschwitz, even while American planes were bombing targets only a few miles away--actions that would not have conflicted with the larger goal of winning the war. What motivated FDR? Medoff explores the sensitive question of the president's private sentiments toward Jews. Unmasking strong parallels between Roosevelt's statements regarding Jews and Asians, he connects the administration's policies of excluding Jewish refugees and interning Japanese Americans. The Jews Should Keep Quiet further reveals how FDR's personal relationship with Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, American Jewry's foremost leader in the 1930s and 1940s, swayed the U.S. response to the Holocaust. Documenting how Roosevelt and others pressured Wise to stifle American Jewish criticism of FDR's policies, Medoff chronicles how and why the American Jewish community largely fell in line with Wise. Ultimately Medoff weighs the administration's realistic options for rescue action, which, if taken, would have saved many lives.

FDR and the Jews

FDR and the Jews PDF Author: Richard Breitman
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674073673
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler's Europe. Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally indifferent and indict him for keeping America's gates closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz's gas chambers. In an extensive examination of this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a consummate politician-compassionate but also pragmatic-struggling with opposing priorities under perilous conditions. For most of his presidency Roosevelt indeed did little to aid the imperiled Jews of Europe. He put domestic policy priorities ahead of helping Jews and deferred to others' fears of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet he also acted decisively at times to rescue Jews, often withstanding contrary pressures from his advisers and the American public. Even Jewish citizens who petitioned the president could not agree on how best to aid their co-religionists abroad. Though his actions may seem inadequate in retrospect, the authors bring to light a concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far greater than those of any other world figure. His moral position was tempered by the political realities of depression and war, a conflict all too familiar to American politicians in the twenty-first century.

Seeking Justice for the Holocaust

Seeking Justice for the Holocaust PDF Author: Graham B. Cox
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
ISBN: 0806165642
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 485

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Book Description
The Nuremberg War Crimes Trial has become a symbol of justice, the pivotal moment when the civilized world stood up for Europe’s Jews and, ultimately, for human rights. Yet the world, represented at the time by the Allied powers, almost did not stand up despite the magnitude of the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis. Seeking justice for the Holocaust had not been an automatic—or an obvious—mission for the Allies to pursue. In this book, Graham Cox recounts the remarkable negotiations and calculations that brought the United States and its allies to this point. At the center of this story is the collaboration between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Herbert C. Pell, Roosevelt’s appointee as U.S. representative to the United Nations War Crimes Commission, in creating an international legal protocol to prosecute Nazi officials for war crimes and genocide. Pell emerges here as an unheralded force in pursuing justice and in framing human rights as an international concern. The book also enlarges our perspective on Roosevelt’s policies regarding European Jews by revealing the depth of his commitment to postwar justice in the face of staunch opposition, even from some within his administration. What made the international effort especially contentious was a debate over its focus—how to punish for aggressive warfare and crimes against humanity. Cox exposes the internal contradictions and contortions behind the U.S. position and the maneuverings of numerous officials negotiating the legal parameters of the trials. Most telling perhaps were the efforts of Robert H. Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg, to circumscribe the scope of new international law—for fear of setting precedents that might boomerang on the United States because of its own racial segregation practices. With its broad new examination of the background and context of the Nuremberg trials, and its expanded view of the roles played by Roosevelt and his unlikely deputy Pell, Seeking Justice for the Holocaust offers a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how the Allies came to hold Nazis accountable for their crimes against humanity.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka PDF Author: Saul Friedlander
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 030019515X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
DIV Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence—in his many letters, in his extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating book investigates some of the sources of Kafka’s personal anguish and its complex reflections in his imaginary world. In his query, Saul Friedländer probes major aspects of Kafka’s life (family, Judaism, love and sex, writing, illness, and despair) that until now have been skewed by posthumous censorship. Contrary to Kafka’s dying request that all his papers be burned, Max Brod, Kafka’s closest friend and literary executor, edited and published the author’s novels and other works soon after his death in 1924. Friedländer shows that, when reinserted in Kafka’s letters and diaries, deleted segments lift the mask of “sainthood� frequently attached to the writer and thus restore previously hidden aspects of his individuality. /div

How to Fight Anti-Semitism

How to Fight Anti-Semitism PDF Author: Bari Weiss
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0593136055
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
WINNER OF THE NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD • The prescient founder of The Free Press delivers an urgent wake-up call to all Americans exposing the alarming rise of anti-Semitism in this country—and explains what we can do to defeat it. “A praiseworthy and concise brief against modern-day anti-Semitism.”—The New York Times On October 27, 2018, eleven Jews were gunned down as they prayed at their synagogue in Pittsburgh. It was the deadliest attack on Jews in American history. For most Americans, the massacre at Tree of Life, the synagogue where Bari Weiss became a bat mitzvah, came as a shock. But anti-Semitism is the oldest hatred, commonplace across the Middle East and on the rise for years in Europe. So that terrible morning in Pittsburgh, as well as the continued surge of hate crimes against Jews in cities and towns across the country, raise a question Americans cannot avoid: Could it happen here? This book is Weiss’s answer. Like many, Weiss long believed this country could escape the rising tide of anti-Semitism. With its promise of free speech and religion, its insistence that all people are created equal, its tolerance for difference, and its emphasis on shared ideals rather than bloodlines, America has been, even with all its flaws, a new Jerusalem for the Jewish people. But now the luckiest Jews in history are beginning to face a three-headed dragon known all too well to Jews of other times and places: the physical fear of violent assault, the moral fear of ideological vilification, and the political fear of resurgent fascism and populism. No longer the exclusive province of the far right, the far left, and assorted religious bigots, anti-Semitism now finds a home in identity politics as well as the reaction against identity politics, in the renewal of America First isolationism and the rise of one-world socialism, and in the spread of Islamist ideas into unlikely places. A hatred that was, until recently, reliably taboo is migrating toward the mainstream, amplified by social media and a culture of conspiracy that threatens us all. Weiss is one of our most provocative writers, and her cri de coeur makes a powerful case for renewing Jewish and American values in this uncertain moment. Not just for the sake of America’s Jews, but for the sake of America.

The Invention of the Jewish People

The Invention of the Jewish People PDF Author: Shlomo Sand
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168362X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.

Beyond Belief

Beyond Belief PDF Author: Deborah E. Lipstadt
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439105340
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 509

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Book Description
This most complete study to date of American press reactions to the Holocaust sets forth in abundant detail how the press nationwide played down or even ignored reports of Jewish persecutions over a twelve-year period.

Dr. Charles David Spivak

Dr. Charles David Spivak PDF Author: Jeanne Abrams
Publisher: University Press of Colorado
ISBN: 0870819739
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Part biography, part medical history, and part study of Jewish life in turn-of-the-century America, Jeanne Abrams's book tells the story of Dr. Charles David Spivak - a Jewish immigrant from Russia who became one of the leaders of the American Tuberculosis Movement. Born in Russia in 1861, Spivak immigrated to the United States in 1882 and received his medical degree from Philadelphia's Jefferson Medical College by 1890. In 1896, his wife's poor health brought them to Colorado. Determined to find a cure, Spivak became one of the most charismatic and well-known leaders in the American Tuberculosis Movement. His role as director of Denver's Jewish Consumptives' Relief Society sanatorium allowed his personal philosophies to strongly influence policies. His unique blend of Yiddishkeit, socialism, and secularism - along with his belief in treating the "whole" patient - became a model for integrating medical, social, and rehabilitation services that was copied across the country. Not only a national leader in the crusade against tuberculosis but also a luminary in the American Jewish community, Dr. Charles Spivak was a physician, humanitarian, writer, linguist, journalist, administrator, social worker, ethnic broker, and medical, public health, and social crusader. Abrams's biography will be a welcome addition to anyone interested in the history of medicine, Jewish life in America, or Colorado history.

The People on the Beach

The People on the Beach PDF Author: Rosie Whitehouse
Publisher: Hurst & Company
ISBN: 1787383776
Category : Holocaust survivors
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
One summer's night in 1946, over 1,000 European Jews waited silently on an Italian beach to board a secret ship. They had survived Auschwitz, hidden and fought in forests and endured death marches--now they were taking on the Royal Navy, running the British blockade of Palestine. From Eastern Europe to Israel via Germany and Italy, Rosie Whitehouse follows in the footsteps of those secret passengers, uncovering their extraordinary stories--some told for the first time. Who were those people on the beach? Where and what had they come from, and how had they survived? Why, after being liberated, did so many Jews still feel unsafe in Europe? How do we--and don't we--remember the Holocaust today? This remarkable, important book digs deep and travels far in search of answers.

Lone Wolf in Jerusalem

Lone Wolf in Jerusalem PDF Author: Ehud Diskin
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
ISBN: 1626345171
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
An Israeli Best Seller A Thrilling Tale of Love, Loss, and Revenge ​Set primarily in post-WWII Israel, Lone Wolf in Jerusalem is a suspenseful, action-packed novel that is a worthy contribution to Jewish historical fiction. Using drama, adventure, and romance, Diskin has created a colorful and captivating story that entertains and educates through the exploits of main protagonist, David Gabinsky. During the war, after losing his family to Hitler's ''final solution,'' young David leads a courageous group of Jewish resistance fighters against the Nazis. When Germany is defeated, he journeys to Jerusalem, to find a new battle brewing. British occupation forces are entrenched in Israel, blocking Holocaust survivors from immigrating to their Jewish homeland. Determined to help his people find freedom, David uses his guerilla skills to single-handedly wreak havoc on the British. As he begins his dangerous quest, David meets and falls in love with the beautiful Shoshana, a young Holocaust survivor whose spirit may have gotten damaged beyond repair. Recounting the tragic losses and heroic triumphs of the Jewish people during this critical stage in their history, Lone Wolf in Jerusalem brings these events to life in a new and inspirational way, making them accessible to a new generation. Originally written in Hebrew, this book quickly became a best seller in Israel.