Teenage Holocaust diarist Anne Frank (1929-1945) is the single best-known individual victim of the Nazi genocide. Her experiences, and those of her family, also figure into the history of America's response to the Holocaust. Documents discovered by the staff of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research,...
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Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) was close to President Franklin D. Roosevelt but was reluctant to raise matters of Jewish concern with the president. Born in Vienna and raised in New York City, Frankfurter gained renown as a member of the Harvard University law school faculty...
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As a freshman at Smith College in 1938, Betty Friedan (1921-2006), a future leader of American feminism, unexpectedly found herself embroiled in the debate over the plight of Germany's Jews. In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom, college president William Allen Neilson urged the students to sign...
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During the months following the German conquest of France in June 1940, thousands of refugees, including both French Jews and exiled German Jews, fled to southern France to avoid capture by the Nazis. Many were prominent political dissidents, intellectuals, writers, and artists. On June 22, Marshal Petain’s...
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