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America abandoned European Jews during the Holocaust mainly because of two men: Franklin D. Roosevelt, US president during the Great Depression and World War II, and Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, then America’s foremost Jewish leader. In The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), Dr. Rafael Medoff explores the influential actions of these two using new archival materials and interviews.
Medoff, founding director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, examines FDR’s ingrained and long-standing antipathy toward Jews that led to indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews. The author illustrates how the president manipulated an esteemed rabbinical leader to keep Jewish protests in check and retain Jewish political support. Meanwhile, Rabbi Wise’s high-level political access engendered in him a sense of self-importance and a fear of fomenting antisemitism that led to his willingness to whitewash the president’s true sentiments and policies.
Medoff begins in 1933 when FDR opposed the American Jewish Congress’ boycott of Nazi Germany asserting harm to America’s economy. FDR refused to criticize the Nazis and undermined the boycott, replacing “Made in Germany” with German city names unrecognizable to most Americans. He kept silent even though he knew that books by Jewish writers were burned, Jews were banned from civil service and certain professions and their numbers limited in universities. He rejected the proposed boycott of the 1936 Berlin Olympics as “undue interference in American-German relations.”