Joseph C. Baldwin (1897-1957), a Republican congressman from New York, strongly supported the rescue of Jewish refugees from the Nazis. Baldwin served three terms in the House of Representatives, representing the 17th District, covering parts of Manhattan He was the lead co-sponsor in the House,...
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Rabbi Meyer Bar-Ilan (1880-1949), the Jerusalem-based leader of the Religious Zionist movement, visited the United States in 1943 and took part in important meetings with government officials and American Jewish leaders. Bar-Ilan's three-day mission to Washington in February of that year illuminated...
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U.S. Senator William Warren Barbour (1888-1943), an advocate for rescue of Jews from the Holocaust, had one of the most unusual backgrounds on Capitol Hill: in 1910, he became the national amateur heavyweight boxing champion of the United States and Canada, after knocking out an opponent in one of two bouts...
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Alben W. Barkley (1877-1956), Democrat of Kentucky, served as Senate Majority Leader from 1937 and 1947 and then as vice president under Harry Truman from 1948 to 1952. Rabbi Meyer Berlin, a leader of the Religious Zionist movement, met with Barkley in February 1943 and was disappointed to find that...
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The Rev. Louis Bauman (1875-1950), pastor of the First Brethren Church of Long Beach, CA from 1913 to 1947, was one of the few prominent Christian theologians who sought to publicize the plight of the Jews under Hitler. Rev. Bauman was an influential teacher, speaker, and writer among evangelical...
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Yitshaq Ben-Ami (1914-1985) helped smuggle Jews from Europe to Palestine in the 1930s, then became one of the leaders of the Bergson Group's campaigns in the United States for rescue of refugees and Jewish statehood. Born and raised in Tel Aviv, Ben-Ami studied at Hebrew University before joining...
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"The Bergson Group" was the name often used to refer to a series of political action committees in the United States during the 1940s that were headed by Hillel Kook, using the name Peter Bergson. The nucleus of the group came out of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Palestine Jewish underground militia associated...
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Despite the Bergson Group's high profile in the 1940s, it was almost entirely ignored as the narrative of the period began to take shape in the postwar years. Mainstream Jewish leaders who clashed with the Bergson Group, such as Rabbi Stephen S. Wise and Nahum Goldmann, omitted any mention of it when...
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A rising tide of calls in the British parliament, media, and churches for Allied assistance to Jewish refugees in early 1943 prodded the British Foreign Office and the State Department to plan an Anglo-American conference on the refugee problem. They initially chose Ottawa as the site for the event,...
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Composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990) was a supporter of the Bergson Group. During the war years, Bernstein anxiously following the news about the slaughter of European Jewry. His symphony "Jeremiah," which premiered in January 1944, included a movement called "Lamentation" that was...
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Hiram (Harry) Bingham IV (1903-1988) played a crucial role in the underground network led by Varian Fry that rescued Jewish and other refugees from Vichy France. Bingham's father, Hiram Bingham III, was the archaeologist who in 1911 discovered the lost Inca city of Machu Picchu, in Peru, and upon whom...
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Sol Bloom (1870-1949), a congressman from New York, staunchly supported the Roosevelt administration's policies on refugees and Palestine and undermined some Jewish groups' initiatives to promote rescue action. The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Bloom found early professional success as a vaudeville...
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Beginning in the late spring of 1944, representatives of Jewish organizations in the United States, Europe, and British Mandatory Palestine began urging Allied officials to take military action to interrupt the mass murder of Jews in Auschwitz. About thirty different Jewish officials were involved,...
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Dr. Isaiah Bowman (1878-1950) was a key adviser to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on population settlement issues and strongly influenced the president's view of the Jewish refugee problem. He was widely known as "Roosevelt's geographer." As chief territorial adviser to President Woodrow Wilson...
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Supreme Court Justice and American Zionist leader Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941) tried but failed to persuade President Franklin D. Roosevelt to take a greater interest in the plight of German Jews in the 1930s. Brandeis recognized early on the grave danger that the Nazis posed to the future of German...
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Actor Marlon Brando (1924-2004) was one of the first public figures in post-World War II America to speak out about the failure of the Allies to aid Europe's Jews during the Holocaust. In the summer of 1946, the 22 year-old Brando co-starred in "A Flag Is Born," a controversial play authored by Ben Hecht,...
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Charles A. Buckley (1890-1967), a Democratic congressman from New York, sought to open Alaska to Jewish refugees from the Nazis. First elected in 1934, Buckley represented his Bronx district on Capitol Hill for thirty years. In November 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom, Rep. Buckley wrote...
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In late 1941 and early 1942, Western diplomats and journalists received scattered information about Nazi massacres of many thousands of Jews in German-occupied Poland and Russia. But the news was difficult to confirm and sounded to many like the usual travails of war. The turning point came in late May...
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As president of Columbia University in the 1930s, Dr. Nicholas Murray Butler (1862-1947) sought to build friendly relations with Nazi Germany. In December 1933, Butler invited the Nazi German ambassador to the United States, Hans Luther, to speak on campus. Butler also hosted a reception for the ambassador....
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