The Nation, a leading U.S. political affairs weekly, spoke out early and vociferously for government action to rescue Europe's Jews. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom in Germany, the journal called for admission to the U.S. of at least 15,000 German Jewish refugee children. The Roosevelt administration’s...
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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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While most major American magazines and newspapers buried or ignored news about the Nazi genocide, a significant exception was the weekly political magazine New Republic, which challenged the Roosevelt administration's refugee policy even though it strongly supported his New Deal policies in general. One...
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Throughout World War II, the American news media published and broadcast timely, detailed, and accurate accounts of what was happening to the Jews in Europe. The New York Times alone printed nearly 1,200 articles about what we have now come to call the Holocaust, about one every other day. The articles...
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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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David K. Niles (1892-1952), the son of Polish Jewish immigrants (their family name was Neyhaus), came to Washington as the personal assistant of White House aide Harry Hopkins. In 1942, Niles was appointed to serve as President Franklin Roosevelt's liaison to labor groups and ethnic minorities. Niles...
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On November 8, 1942, American and British forces, under the command of U.S. General Dwight Eisenhower, invaded Nazi-occupied Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. It took the Allies just eight days to defeat the Germans and their Vichy (pro-Nazi) French partners in the region. For the 330,000 Jews...
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