Saving the Jews: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Holocaust

by Robert N. Rosen, Alan M. Dershowitz (Afterword), Gerhard Weinberg (Foreword by)

Overview

Saving the Jews is a rigorously researched narrative and interpretive history of how FDR and his administration dealt with the Nazi persecution of the Jews and the Holocaust, 1933-1945. It disputes the generally accepted view that Roosevelt abandoned the Jews of Europe and that America was a passive, callous bystander to the Holocaust, and reveals the true story. The author has conducted new research that explains how the Roosevelt administration and American Jewry saved the passengers on the S.S. St. Louis; how American Jews (and the Jews of Palestine) opposed the bombing of Auschwitz and never asked Roosevelt to bomb the camps; how America and other western democracies saved over seventy percent of German Jewry from Hitler; how Rauol Wallenberg was sent to save Jews by the American government. The research done on this book has found no credible evidence that FDR was an anti-Semite but found that Roosevelt was personally close to many Jews. FDR secretly developed the strategy for the Wagners-Rogers Bill (allowing 20,000 German Jewish children to enter the U.S. in 1938, 1939). Yet most historians continue to accuse him of failing to support the bill.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560259954
Publisher:	Basic Books
Publication date:	05/07/2007
Pages:	688
Sales rank:	1,034,402
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Robert N. Rosen is the author of A Short History of Charleston; Confederate Charleston: An Illustrated History of the City adn the People During the Civil War; The Jewish Confederates, and most recently Charleston: A Crossroads of History with Isabella Leland. He is a lawyer in Charleston, South Carolina, and holds an MA in history from Harvard University.

Table of Contents

Foreword   Gerhard L. Weinberg     xiii
List of Illustrations     xvii
List of Abbreviations     xix
Preface     xxi
Prologue     xxix
The New Deal, "The Jew Deal"     1
Wops, Dagoes, Bulls, Hebrews, and Niggers     35
"The Old Roosevelt Magic Has Lost Its Kick"     53
"I Myself Could Scarcely Believe That Such Things Could Occur"     73
"Our Gratitude Is as Immense as the Ocean:" The Voyage of the SS St. Louis     91
"Not a Question of Money, but Lives:" FDR Tries to Ransom German Jewry     105
"Well, Bill, It's Come at Last"     119
"The President Had Said That He Would Wage War but Not Declare It"     141
"We Will Help to End the Curse of Hitlerism"     161
"Spies, Saboteurs, and Traitors Are the Actors in This New Tragedy"     185
"We've Got to Go to Europe and Fight"     205
"No Force on Earth Can Stop Them"     221
"This Bestial Policy of Cold-Blooded Extermination"     237
Placating Moroccans and Killing Japs     255
Disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle     267
"The President Was Deeply Moved by the Situation"     283
American Jewish Patriots, Palestinian Jewish Terrorists, and "TheIrgunist Hoax"     305
"One of the Blackest Crimes of All History" and the War Refugee Board     337
"What Is the Job before Us in 1944?" D-Day and a Dying President     365
"The First Victims Would Be the Jews:" Why FDR Did Not Order the Bombing of Auschwitz     381
FDR Attempts to Create a Jewish State for the Victims of "Indescribable Horrors"     407
The Verdict     425
Postscript     487
Afterword   Alan M. Dershowitz     499
Time line     503
Acknowledgments     523
Bibliography     529
Notes     547
Index     641

Editorial Reviews

Was FDR an indifferent or possibly anti-Semitic president who abandoned European Jews, or was he a pragmatic leader who understood that the key to saving the Jews was winning WWII as swiftly as possible? This bloated, repetitious volume reads like one long apology as it takes on the so-called "revisionist" historians who question FDR's good will; it concludes that he should be "honored for [his] actions during World War II, not defamed." According to Rosen (The Jewish Confederates), FDR may have told ethnic jokes about Jews, but he also surrounded himself with Jewish friends and advisers like Henry Morgenthau Jr. FDR didn't have the political clout to change American immigration laws, and two-thirds of the refugees on the SS St. Louis, who were refused entry to the U.S. in 1939, are believed to have survived the war. Roosevelt probably didn't know about requests by various Jewish leaders to bomb Auschwitz, an action that, Rosen says would have killed Anne Frank and other innocents. Although Rosen is able to debunk some of the more overheated claims put forth four decades ago by Arthur Morse in While Six Million Died, his often simplistic arguments don't undo landmark works like David Wyman's The Abandonment of the Jews. (May) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Independent scholar Rosen (The Jewish Confederates) seeks to correct what he regards as a major imbalance in the historiography of the United States and the Holocaust. Over the past generation, the American government and President Franklin D. Roosevelt have been subjected to withering criticism for having abandoned the Jews of Europe. Rosen rejects this interpretation and instead lauds FDR as a friend of the Jewish people but one who had to operate under a number of political and logistical constraints. Rosen makes several trenchant points. First, we should redirect our anger at the massacres away from ourselves and toward the Nazis and their active supporters. We should also remember that FDR inherited the restrictive immigration policies enacted in 1924 and that the President's job is to enforce the law, not break it. Although some will likely reject his interpretation, Rosen's research is impressive, and he takes into account the crucial domestic context, specifically the rising level of American anti-Semitism, along with the physical constraints that could prevent rescue operations. It is worth remembering that it was almost an entire year after D-day before the Allied armies actually reached the camps. Recommended for all libraries.-Frederic Krome, Jacob Rader Marcus Ctr. of the American Jewish Archives, Cincinnati Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

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