A Letter Sent But Not Published

To the Jerusalem Post Magazine:

There is a pitfall is writing a negative letter about a book based only on a review column while not even leafing through the book and I fear Marion Reiss has taken a tumble (Letter, Dec. 20). She is angry at Janet Levy for noting Rafael Medoff's charge against President Roosevelt that he was antisemitic, Reiss calling it "gratuitous" and without "substantiation". 

But Medoff's The Jews Should Keep Quiet does indeed prove it from FDR's own writings and decisions. It's all in the book and he has published portions of his factual proof in columns even in the JPost which she also seems not to have read.

Worse, she discounts the claim based on one act of kindness Eleanor Roosevelt did for her aunt. Mrs. Roosevelt was her own person and often disagreed with her husband's policies, especially regarding Jews and Israel. is Moreover, Reiss surely knows FDR was a philanderer who carried on an affair with his secretary Lucy Mercer. There was Marguerite 'Missy' LeHand and Dorothy Schiff as well. Is that the type of person an Orthodox woman really would presume couldn't be an anti-Semite?

Can I suggest Reiss be civil, cease hurling epithets and search out historical accuracy by at least reading Medoff's book?

BTW, Marion Reiss is a frequent letter-to-the-editor writer at the paper.

^

Bauer's Anti-Wyman Address

Last week, on the occasion of his 90th birthday, Professor Yehuda Bauer lectured for over 90 minutes, a talk that was a direct attack on Prof. David Wyman and his school.

Wyman, the author of The Abandonment of the Jews, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941 and  A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust, and founder of the institute that bears his name, champions the position that FDR and the Allies could have saved many more Jews than they did.  As noted:

In January 2012, Bauer's article in the Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs entitled "The Holocaust, America and American Jewry" precipitated a bitter debate between himself, Rafael Medoff (Wyman Institute) and Alexander J. Groth (University of California, Davis), on what the US Government and the Jews of America could and could not have done to rescue the Jews of Europe.

I was a part of that argument on a parallel issue.  On the argument, see here, too. Also here. And a contra.  Bauer has also been behind the stonewalling over the years of any proper acknowledgement of the Bergson Group's activities by Yad Vashem (there was more success at the US Holocaust Memorial).

Bauer was afforded a very special platform at the Israel Academy of Sciences in its Van Leer hall.

And he used to it to the fullest, going over his earlier arguments and adding more points. For him, it didn't really matter in the end whether FDR and his State Department officials were anti-Semitic or whatever.  The point he made was that it was not possible to save Jews in any significant number.

Points from my notes of the talk:

a. Were FDR, etc. obligated to save the Jews?

b. Wyman assumes, based on the Protestant background, a religious/moral approach rather than an analytical/political one in judging the issue based on the specific time period.

c. Was the US really obligated to Jews more than any other group threatened?  Did the US intervene in the Abyssinia invasion?  Nanking?  Why should we expect the Jews to be treated better than those?

d.  Germany controlled Europe and there was no way Jews could escape.  By ships?  How could they even reach ports?

e.  He went through specific numbers of possibilities which were minuscule.

f.  The fact of the matter that even when reliable information was passed out from occupied Europe on the fate of the Jews, no one believed it, including many establishment Jews.  So why blame FDR, etc.?

g. Was there anything to bomb?  And when?  He charted distances and flying capabilities. This he needed to do after being roundly criticized at an international conference.

h.  The idea that Zionist leaders, foremost among them Jabotinsky, foresaw the Holocaust is not at all exact.  What Holocaust?  Did they knoiw of an industrial murder machine? Actually, it is a fantastical idea.

i.  The ability of the Allies to accomplish any sort of rescue operations was almost zero. No military action could have been put in place.

j. Even the 400,000 claimed by Wyman/Medoff doesn't exist.

k.  Wallenberg was not a War Relief Board appointee by actually a US-sponsored spy.  And that was why the Soviets treated him they way they did instead of a humanitarian mission.

l.  The Holocaust, as such, wasn't even known until late 1942 and by then the numbers left were not large and there were not planes capable at that time of reaching areas to be attacked as that only happened in late 1943-early 1944.  There weren't that many Jews left to save.

My immediate thought was that even within the framework Bauer constructs, even he cannot know what would have been the effect on Germany had some operations been attempted and declarations made.

On this matter, a review of a new book was brought to my attention.  The book, “1944: FDR and the Year That Changed History,” we read that the author thinks that

Roosevelt should have imbued World War II with a higher moral purpose, making it not only a fight against the Axis but also “a war against the Final Solution.” He adds, “In 1944 he had his chances.”

Such arguments sidestep certain realities, beginning with the emphasis on 1944 as a potentially pivotal year for Jewish rescue. 

Was it that

the opportunity to save a sizable percentage of Jews had long since vanished...By the time of D-Day, a vast majority of European Jews were dead. Winik argues that many thousands of Jews in Hungary could have been saved if the Allies had bombed Ausch­witz in 1944, but whether such raids could have had a significant effect is still hotly ­debated.

And the reviewer also notes

In all, the War Refugee Board and its operatives were credited with rescuing more than 200,000 Jews from the Holocaust — an impressive feat, to be sure, but only a tiny fraction of the millions murdered by the Nazis. The success of the board’s 11th-hour effort underscores the haunting question that runs through Winik’s book: How many more could have been saved had America acted sooner?

So, is Bauer the more correct historian?

To Bauer's claim of "how would the Jews have gotten to the ports?" and "Would the British could have opened Palestine to Jewish refugees?", the Wyman/Medoff school would reply

Some would have managed to find a way, many wouldn't; we don't have to produce some foolproof method. What's important is that the Allies obstructed the possibility of rescue - not because they thought not a single Jew could escape, but because they didn't want the "burden" of having Jewish refugees on their hands.

To Bauer's doubt that even if the Roosevelt administration had established the War Refugee Board in 1943, instead of fighting tooth and nail against its creation, and establishing it only in 1944, how could the WRB staff found ways to rescue more refugees? the reply would be

The exact same way that they did in 1944--sending funds to Europe for bribing and sheltering, sending emissaries to negotiate the opening of blocked-off escape routes, etc; but they would have been doing it for a whole extra year, so more would have been accomplished.

Other responses:

- if the War Refugee Board had been appropriately funding by the U.S. government instead of 90% of its budget supplied by private Jewish organizations, rescue attempts would have benefited from more money = more staff, more funds for bribes, more funds for sheltering Jews underground in Europe, and in general more rescue work.

- as for the claim that the American public was so anti-Semitic that it prevented FDR from setting up numerous temporary shelters for Jewish refugees, instead of just the one token camp in Oswego, New York, where 982 refugees were housed, Bauer knows that the White House commissioned a Gallup poll in April 1944 which found that 70% of Americans were willing to admit an unlimited number of Jewish refugees temporarily until the war ended.

- that a bombing option, which Bauer agrees is but a "moral" matter, is really one of efficacy is answered so: what's not an open question is this: the reason the Allies turned down the bombing requests was not because they thought bombing the camps or the railway tracks wouldn't be effective. They never did study to determine if it would be effective. Instead, the War Department lied and claimed it had done a study and bombing would divert planes from the battlefield. They knew that planes didn't have to be diverted because they were already bombing targets within five miles of the gas chambers. But they lied because they didn't want to use even the most minimal resources for a humanitarian objective--and they didn't want to be left with hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees to deal with.

I can only presume that issue will continue to be contentious.

___________

P.S.  

I was reminded by a comment about something Bauer said which, to me, indicated he is still motivated by a personal political approach.

He recalled that he had appeared on the same platform as then PM Yitzhak Shamir at a Holocaust memorial event and Shamir had declared the lesson of the Holocaust was that Israel had to be strong.  That last part, Bauer said with a bit of denigration and scornful disrespect.

But he also added a description of the event, saying that "Shamir ascended the speaker's p[odium to his full height".  That brought smirks from the audience.  Why?  Because we all know that Shamir was quite short.  Bauer was simply making fun of a physical characteristic that had nothing to do with his point, unless you grasp that Shamir was Lechi and Bauer was Palmah.

He also said something condescending about Barak and his wish that the IDF be a small and compact fighting force but I don't recall the exact words.  But the intent was similar - making fun of him rather than a point of dispute.

^

The Bergson Boys' Day at Yad Vashem

I attended a symposium today at Yad Vashem on the Bergson Group and America's Response to the Final Solution (see the program there).

It was good.

Dr. Rafael Medoff, Professor Moshe Arens, Dr. Joel Zisenwine, Prof. David Wyman, Professor Monty Noam Penkower, Professor Judy Baumol-Schwartz.

Until the words of Prof. Yehuda Bauer were read out. As if 50 years or more hadn't passed and the young HaShomer HaTzair Bauer was fighting the 'good' fight against those naughty Revisionists.

They didn't save any Jews and no Jews could be saved, anyway. They were the break-away group and the Jewish establishment feared their ideology and antisemitism.

Rubbish that was taken care of by the three respondents, left-to-right: R. Medoff, M. Arens, J. Baumol-Schwartz, in a factual and rational method:

Prof. Wyman, for illustrative purposes, held up the 8-foot long form that a potential immigrant needed to fill out:

Becky Kook summed up and dropped a few counter-arguments herself:

Now that the herem of Yad Vashem has been broken, hopefully a new research era has been welcomed in.

And I thank Dr. Medoff for including me in his ackowledgements of the new book of Samuel Merlin.


Additional pics from Gemma Blech here:

above: Prof. Moshe Arens and me

Prof Moshe Arens, Aaron Bashani and me

____________________

UPDATE

The Jerusalem Post video report is now up.  View it.

^

Media Hype To Sell A Book Behind New Claim On Roosevelt?

Following up on the supposedly "new" angle on President FD Roosevelt's attitude towards saving Jews on the eve of World War II (see here), Dr. Rafael Medoff sent me this:

The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies
News Release: May 1, 2009

“NEW EVIDENCE” ON FDR & THE HOLOCAUST?
NOT NEW, AND NOT EVIDENCE OF FDR’S CONCERN

Leading Holocaust scholars have refuted a new book’s claim that there is new evidence President Franklin D. Roosevelt tried to help Jewish refugees from Nazism in the 1930s.

The book, Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald 1933-1945, authored by Richard Breitman, Severin Hochberg, and Barbara McDonald Stewart, was published this week by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Indiana University Press, The book claims to “reveal” FDR’s interest in settling large numbers of Jewish refugees in Africa or Latin America in the 1930s.

“The claims in the book are not new, and they are not evidence that FDR was seriously interested in rescuing Jewish refugees,” said Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. “It is well known that President Roosevelt dabbled in all kinds of pie-in-the sky resettlement schemes, but refrained from taking practical steps to implement them.”

The Wyman Institute has issued a report titled “Not New, Not Evidence: An Analysis of the Claim that Refugees and Rescue Contains New Evidence of FDR’s Concern for Europe’s Jews.”

Prof. Henry Feingold, who wrote extensively on the 1930s resettlement schemes in his book The Politics of Rescue, issued this statement to the Wyman Institute this week:

“President Roosevelt considered himself a nation-builder --even to the point of falsely taking credit for writing the constitution of Cuba, in order to show his impact on history. His own administration had an agency that resettled large numbers of farmers from the Dust Bowl to Alaska and other undeveloped regions.
“There was no financial or political cost in having experts research all sorts of tropical regions and dozens of other remote locations where Jews might theoretically be settled. But when it came to projects that actually had some practical potential, such as Alaska, he was unwilling to cross swords with restrictionists who did not want refugees coming to American territory.
“It was not expensive for Roosevelt to sit in his office and say ‘if you can get me a large scheme that can attract money, I could pursue it’. It cost him nothing to say he was interested. But ultimately he was just being his normal expansive self. The Jewish issue was peripheral to him. FDR was unwilling to confront powerful restrictionists and isolationists, and take the political risks involved.”

Highlights of the Wyman Institute’s report

* Breitman and Hochberg focus on a private statement by FDR that he might ask Congress for $150-million to help resettle Jewish refugees. They cite this as proof of Roosevelt’s concern for the Jews. But FDR never asked Congress for the funds. (And in a 1993 lecture, Breitman himself criticized Roosevelt for not requesting the funds.)

* The resettlement projects cited by Breitman and Hochberg were actually revealed in other books many years ago, including Henry Feingold’s The Politics of Rescue (1970), David Wyman’s Paper Walls (1968), Haim Genizi’s American Apathy (1983), and Prof. Breitman’s own 1987 book, American Refugee Policy and European Jewry (coauthored by Alan Kraut).

* James McDonald, who is the subject of the new book, himself repeatedly pressed Roosevelt to raise money for the refugees--but FDR never did so. By late 1939, McDonald lost faith in Roosevelt’s promise.

* The book erroneously gives FDR credit for combining the German and Austrian quotas, and for initiating the 1938 Evian refugee conference, when in fact State Department officials initiated those steps.

* New research by other scholars has revealed new information which reflects badly on the Roosevelt administration with regard to the Jewish refugee issue. The forthcoming book The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses, by Prof. Stephen Norwood, reveals that U.S. consular officials abroad obstructed efforts by American universities to bring European refugee students to their campuses.

Two recent books about settling Jewish refugees in the Dominican Republic reveal that “the State Department’s hostility and obstructionism” played a more significant role in undermining that project than previously known. The books are Tropical Zion: General Trujillo, FDR, and the Jews of Sosua (Duke University Press, 2009), by Prof. Allen Wells, and Dominican Haven: The Jewish Refugee Settlement in Sosua, 1940-1945 (Museum of Jewish Heritage, 2008), by Prof. Marion A. Kaplan.

* * *

I guess that NYTimes article was generated media hype to sell the book.

Well, Roger Cohen Has Been Rogered

In the New York Times' letters-to-the-editor section, three writers roger a columnist who is either an idiot, a fool or an ignoramous or an agent of Iran.

Here:

The Jews in Iran, and Iran’s Rank in the World

To the Editor:

Re “Iran, Jews and Pragmatism” (column, March 16):

Roger Cohen says that the “rage” in response to his claim that Iran’s Jews are safe and secure erupted because “the hawks’ case against Iran depends on a vision of an apocalyptic regime” that is “frenziedly anti-Semitic.” He says that “the presence of these Jews” in Iran “undermines that vision.”

The status of the Jews in Iran should be evaluated based on the facts, regardless of hawks’ or doves’ political positions regarding United States policy toward Iran.

The State Department — which does not embrace the hawks’ position on Iran — in its “International Religious Freedom Report 2008” found that Iran’s Jews live in a “threatening atmosphere” and that religious minorities suffer “officially sanctioned discrimination, particularly in the areas of employment, education, and housing.” The government “limited the distribution of Hebrew texts, particularly nonreligious texts, making it difficult to teach the language.”

Is the Iranian regime “frenziedly anti-Semitic,” as Mr. Cohen puts it? According to the State Department, “There was a rise in officially sanctioned anti-Semitic propaganda involving official statements, media outlets, publications and books.”

Among other examples, the report noted the publication in the Iranian press of “anti-Semitic editorial cartoons depicting demonic and stereotypical images of Jews” and an Iranian television broadcast of a documentary describing “the Jewish plan for genocide of humanity.”

Three-quarters of Iran’s Jews have emigrated in the 30 years since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and the State Department report noted that some Iranian Jews are continuing to emigrate, “partially due to continued anti-Semitism by the government and within society.”

Rafael Medoff
Washington

The writer is director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies.

•

To the Editor:

I question Roger Cohen’s reference to Iran as “the Middle East’s least undemocratic state outside Israel.” Elections in Iran and the candidates for elections are determined by one man: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme authority in Iran.

The Jews in Iran should be seen as pawns or hostages in case Israel decides to attack Iran. Iran’s Jews have been imprisoned or executed, accused of spying for Israel. Their status is precarious.

If President Obama wants to prevent Iran from acquiring the atomic bomb, short of resorting to military action, he must talk only with Ayatollah Khamenei. Otherwise, he will be wasting his time and may be giving Israel no alternative but using force to protect itself.

Heskel M. Haddad
New York

The writer is president of the World Organization of Jews From Arab Countries, which represents Jews from Islamic countries.

•

To the Editor:

Roger Cohen first declares that Iran is “the Middle East’s least undemocratic state outside Israel,” but then later admits that “Iran is an un-free society.”

That is an understatement. According to the Freedom House “Freedom of the World” report for 2008, Turkey, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria, Egypt, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates are all more “free” than Iran.

Only Sudan, whose leader is being sought for crimes against humanity, Saudi Arabia and Syria received worse scores than Iran. Iran is one of the least “free” countries in the Middle East.

Freedom House also ranks countries according to “electoral process,” by which Yemen, Turkey, Morocco, Lebanon, Kuwait and Iraq all rank higher than Iran.

Mr. Cohen’s optimism regarding democracy and freedom in Iran, and the implications it has for United States policy, is undermined by Freedom House’s findings.

Gabriel M. Scheinmann
Arlington, Va.

Rafi Medoff's Letter on Churchill

Good work!

William Kristol (“The Jewish State at 60,” column, May 12) recalls that as the Nazis prepared for war, “the civilized world was helpless. Churchill’s pleas to act were ignored. The world was plunged into war,” and six million Jews were murdered.

It is true that Churchill’s pre-World War II warnings about the Nazi menace were generally ignored. It is also true, however, that Churchill had the opportunity to save the lives of many Jews from the Holocaust, but failed to do so.

By upholding the White Paper policy of closing the doors of Palestine to all but a handful of Jewish refugees, Churchill shut off one of the few havens for those fleeing Hitler.

Moreover, Churchill assigned refugee rescue matters to his Foreign Office, which repeatedly sabotaged rescue opportunities because it feared what one official called “the difficulties of disposing of any considerable number of Jews should they be rescued from enemy occupied territory.”

Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. characterized the Churchill government’s attitude as “a satanic combination of British chill and diplomatic double-talk, cold and correct and adding up to a sentence of death.”

Rafael Medoff
Washington, May 12, 2008