Fiorello La Guardia, the feisty mayor of New York City from 1934 to 1945, spoke out forcefully against Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews, despite political risks and the dangers faced by his own sister, who was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. La Guardia encouraged the boycotting of German...

Carl Laemmle (1867-1939), a German Jewish immigrant to the United States, was a successful Hollywood producer who helped several hundred German Jews reached the United States during the Hitler era. Universal Pictures, the studio he founded in 1912, was responsible for such films as “All Quiet on the Western...

As governor of Kansas, Alf Landon (1887-1987) was an early critic of the persecution of Jews in Nazi Germany, publicly condemning "the inhuman treatment now accorded the Jews in Germany" in 1933. By contrast, President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not raise the plight of German Jewry at any of the 82 press...

As a young journalist in 1943, Melvin J. Lasky (1920-2004) authored an unusually stinging critique of the Allies' response to the Holocaust. Writing in the pages of The New Leader (of which he was literary editor) on October 23, 1943, Lasky authored a J'Accuse titled "The Shame of a World." He condemned...

The Allied armies dashing toward Berlin in the spring of 1945 stumbled upon Germany's extensive network of concentration camps. But when America's newspapers, radio broadcasters, and newsreel editors reported the liberation of the camps, they almost never mentioned their Jewish inmates. Newspapers...

Aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974), a national hero for making the first solo transatlantic flight, later caused controversy by making extreme isolationist and antisemitic remarks which both outraged and intimidated many American Jews. Lindbergh paid a friendly visit to Nazi Germany in 1936 and came...

Mrs. Margaret Ashton Stimson Lindsley (1889-1956), better known as Lorna Lindsley, was a globetrotting journalist and activist whose causes including aiding Jewish refugees in occupied France. A cousin to Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Lindsley covered the Spanish Civil War for several publications...

Hungarian-American movie actor Bela Lugosi (1882-1956), best known for his role as Dracula, took part in protests against the persecution of European Jewry. Because of his union activism, Lugosi was compelled to flee his native Hungary in 1919. Dodging U.S. immigration restrictions, he sneaked into...