https://mosaicmagazine.com/observation/politics-current-affairs/2023/07/the-biden-administrations-historically-ignorant-strategy-to-counter-anti-semitism/?utm_
In response to the alarming rise of anti-Jewish activism and calls from concerned Jews to do something about it, the Biden administration recently announced a “first-ever” National Strategy to Counter Anti-Semitism (NSCA), outlining over a hundred new actions that executive-branch agencies have committed to take within a year. Most Jews and fellow Americans welcome this as an obviously encouraging response to an ever-more-pressing problem. But both the administration and the Jews who pushed it to action have much to learn from an historical precedent that likewise publicized its intention of countering anti-Semitism but instead did irreparable damage.
In 1938 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was under increasing political and moral pressure to address the crisis facing the Jews of Europe. Hitler had begun his program of eliminating the Jews from Germany and the countries that he intended to conquer. Ideological Jew-blame, fueled by fascist parties across the continent, encouraged other countries like Poland and Romania to target their Jewish populations.
Anti-Jewish politics promoted by German propagandists had also penetrated America. The KKK, Henry Ford, Father Coughlin, and Charles Lindbergh helped the Nazis carry the fascist message in the interwar years. Counteracting the demands to rescue the Jews from Europe were two compelling priorities: isolationism and fallout from the Great Depression. Those who called for opposing Hitler were accused of dragging America into an unwanted war.
Nazi annexation of Austria in 1938, threatening its 180,000 Jews, finally forced Roosevelt to take action. He convened an international conference in the French resort town of Evian-les-Bains to consider what could be done to resettle European refugees; Jews were not named. But the president preemptively excluded from consideration both North America and Palestine—the two most obvious destinations. Hitler had announced that he would help the Jews leave for any countries that agreed to take them, but the only country that did was the Dominican Republic, which accepted 800 of Europe’s 9 million. To Nazi propagandists, this was proof that the Jews were toxic, unwanted by everyone.
Fear of anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant sentiment kept Roosevelt from allowing Jewish refugees into his own country. But since 1918 Britain had been charged by the League of Nations with allowing for the establishment of a Jewish national home in Mandatory Palestine. Surely this was the natural destination for Jewish refugees. Here, however, Britain’s perfidy exceeded even Roosevelt’s political cowardice. Determined to prevent an influx of Jews, the British-appointed Muslim leader Amin al-Husseini incited violence that by the late 1930s cowed London into agreeing to his demand to stop Jewish immigration. Rather than challenging Britain’s criminal betrayal of responsibility, Evian reaffirmed its right to stop Jews from entering their land. Thus, the conference called to address the crisis instead camouflaged its own inaction. Worse, the mufti, like Hitler, whom he admired, took it as a green light to pursue the elimination of Jews from the Middle East. Even assuming the president’s intentions were good, he failed to take seriously enough those intent on destroying the Jews.
