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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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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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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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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Sol Bloom (1870-1949), a congressman from New York, strongly 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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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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Shortly after the German invasion of Poland in 1939, Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the leader of Revisionist Zionism, asked the British to create a Jewish armed force to take part in the war against Hitler. Twenty-five years earlier, Jabotinsky had successfully lobbied London to create the Jewish Legion,...
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Thomas L. J. D'Alesandro (1903-1987), a member of Congress in the 1940s, supported the Bergson Group's campaigns for rescue of refugees and Jewish statehood. D'Alesandro, a Democrat, was a member of the House of Representatives from 1939 to 1947, and then mayor of Baltimore from 1947 to 1959. Beginning...
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Samuel Dickstein (1885-1954), a Democratic congressman from New York, challenged the Roosevelt administration's failure to aid European Jewry. Dickstein served eleven consecutive terms in the House of Representatives, from 1923 through 1945, and chaired the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization...
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In the United States during the Holocaust, most Episcopal leaders, like most leaders of other church denominations, refrained from speaking out about the Jews' plight. But there were important exceptions. Two Episcopal schools, the General Theological Seminary (New York) and the Berkeley Divinity...
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James W. Gerard (1867-1951), attorney and diplomat, was an outspoken critic of Nazi Germany's persecution of the Jews. Gerard, who served as U.S. ambassador to Germany from 1913 to 1917, spoke at a number of anti-Hitler rallies in the 1930s. He was a speaker at the May 1933 founding conference of the American...
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Guy M. Gillette (1879-1973), a three-term U.S. Senator from Iowa, was one of the most vigorous advocates in Congress for the rescue of Jewish refugees. Gillette, a Democrat, was an active supporter of the Bergson Group's Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe, made numerous speeches...
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Media magnate William Randolph Hearst (1863-1951) strongly supported the campaign for U.S. action to rescue Jews from the Holocaust. In his early years, Hearst occasionally uttered the kind of antisemitic remarks typical of the late 19th century upper-crust Protestant society. By the 1890s,...
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Author, playwright and Hollywood screenwriter Ben Hecht (1894-1964) was a leading activist for the rescue of European Jews from the Holocaust and creation of a Jewish State. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, Hecht grew up in Racine (Wisconsin) and Chicago in what he described as a "large, extended,...
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Rabbi Dr. Arthur Hertzberg (1921-2006), a prominent Jewish leader and civil rights activist who took part in the 1963 March on Washington with Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., also participated in the 1943 rabbis' march to the White House. Writing about that experience, in the introduction to an online...
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Comedian Bob Hope (1903-2003) was one of a number of prominent entertainers who volunteered to take part in a fundraising event at Madison Square Garden for the Bergson Group's Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People of Europe. The "Show of Shows," held on March 13, 1944, attracted a full house...
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Author and poet Langston Hughes (1902-1967) was one of a number of prominent African-American supporters of the Bergson Group. He served as one of the honorary "Sponsors" of the group's Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, in 1943. Sources: Medoff, FDR and the Holocaust,...
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Novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960) was one of a number of prominent African-American supporters of the Bergson Group. She served as one of the honorary "Sponsors" of the group's Emergency Conference to Save the Jewish People of Europe, in 1943. Sources: Medoff, FDR and the Holocaust, pp.63,...
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As secretary of the interior under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harold L. Ickes (1874-1952) repeatedly found himself at odds with the president over U.S. policy toward Europe's Jews. A draft of a speech by Ickes condemning the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany was censored by the president...
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While visiting the United States in 1943, Leib Jaffe (1876-1948), an editor and poet from Palestine, sought to galvanize American Jewish leaders to respond more energetically to the slaughter of European Jewry. Jaffe, a Hebrew poet, former editor of the newspaper Ha'aretz, and fundraiser for the Zionist...
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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...
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Republican congresswoman Clare Booth Luce (1903-1987) was an outspoken supporter of rescue and Jewish statehood. A child actress, then a successful playwright and journalist, Clare married the influential publisher of Time, Life, and Fortune, Harry Luce, in 1935. She served as a Life correspondent...
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During World War II, the Roosevelt administration established a government commission, nicknamed the Monuments Men, to rescue historic paintings and monuments in war zones. Refugee advocates urged the administration to take a similar interest in rescuing Jews from the Nazis. In May 1943, shortly after...
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U.S. Senator James E. Murray (1876-1961), Democrat of Montana, strongly supported the Bergson Group's campaign for U.S. action to rescue European Jewry. Murray was an unlikely ally of the Jews. He was elected to the senate on a platform pledging "one hundred per-cent support" for President Franklin...
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Historian and Zionist activist Benzion Netanyahu (1910-2012), who came to British Mandatory Palestine as a child after World War I, became active in Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionist movement almost from its inception. By the early 1930s, he was serving on its executive committee and editing...
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Louis I. Newman (1893-1972) received his rabbinical ordination from Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and served as Wise's assistant rabbi at the Free Synagogue, in New York City, before becoming the spiritual leader of San Francisco's Temple Emanu-El in 1922 and, later, the rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Shalom,...
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Soon after the United States entered World War II, the Roosevelt administration began planning for the arrest and postwar prosecution of Nazi war criminals. Even at that early stage, the Allies knew enough about Nazi atrocities against Jews and others to know that if and when they won the war, they would...
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Former Roosevelt administration official Henry F. Pringle (1897-1958) was active in the Bergson Group's campaigns challenging U.S. policy on Jewish refugees. A newspaper reporter who later become a professor at the Columbia University School of Journalism, Pringle won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1931...
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Painter and illustrator Arthur Szyk (1894-1951) used his art both to aid the Allied war effort and to promote the rescue of Jews from the Holocaust. In the 1930s, Szyk created a Passover Haggadah which infused the ancient exodus story with anti-Nazi imagery. His Egyptian taskmasters wore swastika armbands,...
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U.S. Senator Elbert D. Thomas (1883-1953), Democrat of Utah and former Mormon missionary, was an outspoken advocate of rescue of Jews from the Holocaust. Thomas grew up in Salt Lake City in the late 1800s, where his family experienced prejudice because of their Mormon beliefs, an experience that...
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Journalist and civil rights activist Oswald Villard (1872-1949) added his name to several public protests on behalf of European Jewry. Born in Germany but raised in the United States, Villard was one of fifty prominent German-Americans to sign a full-page newspaper advertisement in December 1942...
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To alert the American public about of European Jewry, screenwriter and Bergson Group activist Ben Hecht in 1943 authored a dramatic pageant called "We Will Never Die." On a stage featuring forty foot-high tablets of the Ten Commandments, it would survey Jewish contributions to civilization throughout...
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Internationally renowned composer Kurt Weill (1900-1950), exiled from Nazi Germany, used his talents to promote rescue of refugees and Jewish statehood. Weill, who is best remembered for such classics as his collaboration with playwright Bertolt Brecht on "The Threepenny Opera," was denounced as a "degenerate"...
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