Cass Sunstein, FDR and Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Did Cass Sunstein read Jabotinsky?

I discovered, while researching another project, that

Sunstein's 2004 book, The Second Bill of Rights: FDR's Unfinished Revolution and Why We Need It More than Ever, advocates the Second Bill of Rights proposed by Franklin D. Roosevelt...Sunstein argues that the Second Bill of Rights has had a large international impact and should be revived in the United States. 

Sunstein was born on September 21, 1954 in Concord, Massachusetts to Marian (née Goodrich), a teacher, and Cass Richard Sunstein, a builder, both Jewish.

He is a scion of the Vilna Gaon and married to Samantha Power.

and a pundit.

Five of the original eight "rights" that FDR proposed in early 1944 and advanced now by Sunstein, echo Ze'ev Jabotinsky's famous Five Memim article.  FDR spoke of eight specific rights: Employment, Food, clothing, and leisure with enough income to support them, Farmers' rights to a fair income, Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies, Housing, Medical care, Social security, Education.

This book expands on Jabotinsky's thinking:

as does this one:

Chronologically, Jabotinsky preceded FDR.

His thinking on issues of social and economic import were just as much part of his outlook and philosophy as was his political and security stances.

Let's remember that.  The Right can be very much right.

^

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.

Holocaust History: The Roosevelt Angle

No, this is not from the Wyman Institute (and see this and here) and see in the body of the article.

Roosevelt and the Jews: A Debate Rekindled

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s legacy has been slid back under the microscope recently as his efforts to pull the country out of the Great Depression are scrutinized. Now a piece of his foreign policy is also being re-evaluated in a soon-to-be published book that upends a widely held view that he was indifferent to the fate of Europe’s Jews, and asserts that new evidence shows that the president pushed for an ambitious secret rescue plan before the war began.

...“It is a book that will change the consensus about the role of President Roosevelt,” said Deborah Lipstadt...

The book, “Refugees and Rescue: The Diaries and Papers of James G. McDonald, 1935-1945,” will undoubtedly reignite the charged debate over whether Roosevelt could have done more to rescue millions of Jews, Gypsies, gay people, dissidents and others who died in Nazi death camps...Mr. McDonald was the high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations, the chairman of a presidential advisory committee on refugees and later the first American ambassador to Israel...

The editors — the historians Richard Breitman, Barbara McDonald Stewart and Severin Hochberg — maintain that Roosevelt did a lot...“He was a man of grand vision who wanted to resettle a much larger number of refugees from Germany” and elsewhere, the editors conclude, citing a directive from Washington in June 1938 indicating that officials should deal with “the problems of refugees from all countries.” They agree that such efforts were completely dropped in 1940 when Roosevelt turned his attention to the war...

...On May 4, 1939, Roosevelt met at the White House with Jewish leaders and told them that there was no time to set up a new foundation, but that an existing organization should immediately agree to the plan.

“It was not so much a question of the money as it was of actual lives, and the president was convinced that the warnings given by our embassy in Berlin were sound and not exaggerated,” according to the diary of Jay Pierrepont Moffat, a State Department official at the meeting.

Refugee leaders were still at odds when Hitler invaded Poland on Sept. 1.

David Wyman and Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington, who have written extensively about America’s response to the persecution of Jews, are unimpressed with the excerpts from “Refugees and Rescue” that they’ve read.

Most of the actions have been mentioned in some form before, they said in a statement. In their view, Roosevelt may have talked about some pie-in-the-sky plans, but when it came to taking substantive action, he did nothing. For instance, they said, he opposed the 1939 Wagner-Rogers bill that would have permitted the United States to take in 20,000 Jewish children from Germany in addition to the existing German-Austrian quota of 27,370.

“F.D.R. failed to ask for that $150 million, just as he failed to support Wagner-Rogers,” they said. “Both actions by F.D.R. indicate his lack of seriousness about helping Jewish refugees.” They added that his “administration discouraged and obstructed would-be immigrants.”