In late 1941 and early 1942, Western diplomats and journalists received scattered information about Nazi massacres of many thousands of Jews in German-occupied Poland and Russia. But the news was difficult to confirm and sounded to many like the usual travails of war. The turning point came in late May...
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Louis D. Gross (1885-1964) was a congregational rabbi and newspaper publisher who riled mainstream Jewish leaders with his spirited calls for U.S. action to aid refugees. Rabbi Gross was spiritual leader of the Union Temple, a Reform synagogue in Brooklyn. He founded the Brooklyn Jewish Examiner,...
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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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Although he was one of the most influential and widely-read journalists in America during the 1930s and 1940s, syndicated columnist Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) refrained from writing about the persecution of Europe's Jews. Born to a wealthy, assimilated German Jewish family in New York City, Lippmann...
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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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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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In 1931, two years before the Nazis rose to power, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded the 1936 Olympic games to Germany. After Adolf Hitler became chancellor in 1933, anti-Nazi activists in the United States began arguing that Nazi Germany's policies should disqualify Berlin from hosting...
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