William Langer (1886-1959), Republican of North Dakota, served in the U.S. Senate from 1940 to 1959. He was a strong supporter of Jewish statehood and American action to rescue Jewish refugees. Langer delivered the keynote address at a November 1942 rally for Jewish statehood organized by the Revisionist ZIonists. When Senator Scott Lucas denounced the Bergson Group’s newspaper advertisement criticizing the Bermuda refugee conference, Langer fired back on the floor of the Senate. “Two million Jews in Europe have been killed off already and another five million are awaiting the same fate unless they are saved immediately,” Langer told his colleagues. “Every day, every hour, every minute that passes, thousands of them are being exterminated.” He said if the U.S. failed to intervene, it would bear “the moral responsibility of being passive bystanders.”

Langer endorsed the Bergson Group’s July 1943 Emergency Conference to Save Jewish People of Europe. In response to the march by 400 rabbis in Washington in October 1943, Langer called on his colleagues to endorse the rabbis’ call for creation of a U.S. government rescue agency. After the war, Langer cooperated with the Bergson Group, the Revisionist Zionsits, and the splinter Political Action Committee for Palestine in supporting the campaign for ouster of the British from Palestine and establishment of a Jewish state.

Sources: Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews, pp.143-144;
Medoff, Militant Zionism in America, pp.81-82, 166-169.