Actress and acting coach Stella Adler (1901-1992) played a central role in the work of the Bergson Group during and after the Holocaust. Her parents, Sara and Jacob Adler, were stars of the early twentieth-century Yiddish theater, and Stella was an acclaimed actress since childhood. In the 1930s,...
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Benjamin Akzin (1904-1985) was a staff member of the War Refugee Board and advocate of U.S. air strikes on the Auschwitz death camp. After completing doctorates in political science and law at the universities of Vienna and Paris, the Latvian-born Akzin traveled to the United States in the 1930s...
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In the wake of the November 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes began promoting a plan to use Alaska as a haven for Jewish refugees. Rich in natural resources but badly underpopulated, the vast northern territory had been purchased by the U.S. from Czarist Russia...
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During 1941-1942, the British and American governments received increasingly detailed reports about machine-gun massacres of tens of thousands of European Jews by the Nazis in occupied Russia. One eyewitness account described freshly-covered mass graves “heaving like the sea” from the movement of victims...
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