http://www.algemeiner.com/2012/09/03/double-review-%E2%80%98millions-of-jews-to-rescue%E2%80%99-and-%E2%80%98herbert-hoover-and-the-jews%E2%80%99-review/#
Herbert Hoover and the Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Vote” and Bipartisan Support for Israel, by Sonja Schoepf Wentling and Rafael Medoff (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).
Millions of Jews to Rescue: A Bergson Group Leader’s Account of the Campaign to Save Jews from the Holocaust, by Samuel Merlin. Edited and annotated by Rafael Medoff (Washington: Wyman Institute, 2012).
One of my earliest childhood memories is politically tainted. In November 1944, when I was not yet eight, my father assigned me to distribute “Vote for FDR” leaflets near (probably illegally near) a Brooklyn polling station. It was not a task that required courage. In my Brownsville neighborhood, it would have been easier to find a Jew who ate pork than one who would deny Roosevelt a fourth term as president in favor of Republican Thomas Dewey. Every segment of American Jewry embraced Roosevelt. From right to left, east European to German, working class to middle class, Jews adored the Commander in Chief of the war against Hitler. Rabbi Stephen Wise, the most important American Jewish leader of the time, said that American Jews “rightly look up to [FDR], revere him, and love him…No one would more deeply sorrow than I…if this feeling of Jewish homage…should be changed.” Wise sycophantically (Jeremiah might have said, idolatrously) referred to FDR as “the All Highest.”
Yet the record of Roosevelt’s administration with regard to the European Jews being hunted and murdered by Nazism was shameful. Wise himself wrote to a colleague in 1933 that “FDR has not lifted a finger on behalf of the Jews of Germany.” Indeed, ever since the publication of David Wyman’s Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-41 (1968), and Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue (1970), it has been common knowledge that although the U.S. under FDR admitted more Jewish refugees than other Western nations between 1933 and 1945 its record was actually worse than theirs. “American ability to absorb immigration,” Wyman wrote, “was vastly greater than that of the small European countries …Viewed in relation to capacity, the English, Dutch, French and others …were more generous than the United States.”