Rejuvenation: Not Quiet Anymore

[Music] hi everybody Eve Harrow on rejuvenation for the land of his own Network it is December 18th 2019 the 20th day of Kislev 5780 and i'm on the second week of a trip now to the states first week was family wedding going to a camera event in New York spending some time with my husband who who came with me seeing a wonderful play come from a way on Broadway and and also doing something from when it's all fun didn't Woodmere but I drove down to the Washington DC area yesterday was pouring rain and foggy today happens to be beautiful too to do some things in this area now until I go home on Sunday when you'll be listening to this podcast and I'm sitting now with dr. Rafa medoff noted historian director of the David s Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington DC author of numerous books about America's response to the Holocaust and specifically he graciously agreed to the interview today to talk about his newest book the Jews should keep quiet so dr. Madoff thank you so much for sitting with me today hi you've glad to be with you okay so this is an interesting title for a book the Jews should keep quiet so tell us a little bit about your latest publication well the phrase the Jews should keep quiet is a close paraphrase of something which President Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly said to Rabbi Stephen s wise the foremost American Jewish leader in that era during their occasional meetings over the years it's also what wise often then transmitted to members of the American Jewish community who were considering protesting against Roosevelt's policies toward Jewish refugees so in other words you have a kind of a tragic chain here where the President of the United States pressured the leading Jewish figure in the u.s. to refrain from speaking out about US policy during the Holocaust US policy toward the Jews in Europe there period and then some Jewish leaders likewise in turn trying to keep the more militant elements of the Jewish community from speaking out so what was the US policy during World War 2 towards the Jews who were trying to flee the Nazis in Europe President Roosevelt's policy is best summed up in the title of the definitive study of the American response to the Holocaust the abandonment of the Jews that was the title of Professor David Wyman's best-selling 1984 book which really remains the gold standard in scholarship about the period the essence of professor Wyman's findings and findings of other scholars since was that the United States that is the Roosevelt administration had numerous opportunities to rescue Jewish refugees during the 1930s and the 1940s and yet deliberately chose not to act on those opportunities and try to close America's doors as tightly as possible to Jewish refugees who were seeking admission so of course that this begs the question why and that is the question at the heart of this new book the Jew should keep quiet it's a question that has haunted me as a historian for decades because most of the previous scholarship on this subject while revealing the basic facts of the story have never been able to get to the heart of the question why why did Roosevelt take this position which at first glance seems to be so much at odds with his public image you know he ran for president first time in 1930 to present himself as the champion of the little / of the little guy the ferg of the Forgotten guy that was kind of a soundbite that he and his campaign in aids developed and that was his public persona that he was a broad-minded liberal minded humanitarian and yet when it came to the fate of the Jews injured in Nazi Germany and nazi-occupied Europe a Roosevelt showed no interest or almost no interest let's say during those tragic years but this is more than just not showing interest there were quotas that the United States had for accepting Jewish refugees not very large numbers to begin with and even they weren't filled and I remember my grandparents and my grandfather died when I was 16 which is a while back but in the few conversations that I had with him and I wasn't politically aware young teenager I remember distinctly him think he and his generation feeling that FDR was the most incredible thing that had happened to the Jewish people so why is there such a disparity between the image that people had and this you were talking he died in 1977 so we're talking four decades after the war and the reality well American Jewish support for President Roosevelt was was very substantial according to the polls at the time it seems that in the range of 90% of American Jews voted for FDR every time in hindsight that does seem perplexing given what we know about Roosevelt's abandonment of European Jews but the key word here is hindsight much of what we are discussing now was not known to average American Jews at the time in the 30s and 40s it was known to Jewish leaders rabbi Stephen wise and other leaders of major Jewish organizations and that that raises an interesting and complicated question about the disparity between what Jewish leaders knew and what they shared with the rest of the community but as to the the the basic question why did use vote for Roosevelt in such large numbers well we start with the fact that they simply didn't realize that there were so many opportunities to rescue refugees they didn't know the extra steps that the Roosevelt administration took for example to keep refugees out and then you you alluded a moment ago to the issue of the quotas never being filled that takes us back to the heart of this question why why go out of their way why did the administration go out of its way to suppress the level of Jewish immigration below what the law already allowed now America's immigration system during that period had been enacted into law in the early 1920s it was a quota system based on national origins meaning that there was a specific number a maximum number of people from any one country who could in theory immigrated to the u.s. each year irrespective of their religion just there whatever country they were coming out of right the the quota for Germany for example was about 26 thousand in the 1930s now the vast majority of German citizens seeking admission to the US then were in fact Jews although not all of them but because of the Nazi persecution most Germans who were fleeing were Jews fleeing from Nazi anti-semitism so the quota was 26,000 it increased a little bit after Germany annexed Austria in 1938 and was brought close to 28,000 but that figure was filled only one time during FDR's 12 years in office from 1933 to 1945 the annual quota from Germany was filled only once and in most of the year of the of the 11 years when it was not filled it was less than 25 percent filled so 75 percent of the available quota places in each of those years were simply not used now immigration quota places visas did not if they were not used they did not roll over into the next year they were simply thrown in the wastebasket if you add up all the unused quota places from Germany and then later from German occupied countries in Europe from 33 to 45 the total number is about 200,000 in other words 200,000 visas that were simply unused this this number this phenomenon is important for several reasons first of all when sometimes when we hear public discussions about Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust those who defend his track record will say that there was so much anti-semitism at the time so much public opposition to immigration so much congressional opposition to immigration there Roosevelt's hands were tied now it's certainly true that the public was overwhelmingly opposed to more immigration and that's really not surprising because we're talking about the period of the Great Depression so people were afraid of foreigner coming and taking jobs away from American citizens so that's that's part of it and it's also true that Congress was overwhelmingly anti-immigration so it was not realistic for to suggest that that FDR could have gone to Congress and requested and and succeeded in passing a liberalization of the quota system but when we realized that there were 200,000 unused visas within the existing quota system then that whole defense of FDR really falls apart because we're not really arguing about whether or not he could have defied public opinion defied Congress what we're what we realize is that he did not have to start a big public debate about immigration he did not have to start a fight with Congress he didn't have to risk his own political future by doing something unpopular all he had to do was quietly tell the government officials in those days it was the State Department the government officials in charge of immigration to allow the existing quotas to be filled to simply honor the law as it was so why did the administration go so above and beyond the quotas why did they suppress immigration so far below the levels at the existing law would have allowed and incidentally I should add it was not just Germany but Poland also the the quota from Poland it was small but it was never filled during all those years so these are these are the questions that that have captivated me since my earliest days as a historian why go that far and there are other similar questions which again earlier historians did not address other other instances in which the president and his his administration went far beyond what the law allowed I'll give you another example sometimes we hear and in fact FDR and his aides said at the time there were no ships available to bring in Jewish refugees to America or anyplace else it was the middle of a war and wall ships were needed for the war effort and that was a that was an effective argument by the president and his spokesman because that's very intimidating for a Jewish leader to say why not let some more Jews into the US so as to escape the Nazis and to be told what we need though ships for the war effort well then it's almost like it's almost you know unpatriotic to say no use the ships for Refugees here's the astounding reality there were ships called Liberty ships which were used to bring American soldiers and military equipment to Europe after they unloaded this cargo typically in England later France the ships were empty and they returned to the United States empty because they were empty the ships were extremely light they had to be weighed down with rubble what they call ballast chunks of concrete in order to keep the boats from capsizing that's how light they were and some Jewish refugee advocates at the time pointed out that they might just as easily have loaded them down with Jewish refugees ships were returning empty and yet they were never used for a humanitarian purpose even though they could have been without detracting from the war effort so again we have an otherwise inexplicable phenomenon they were told Jewish groups were told that the ships were need exclusively for the war effort but in fact they returned empty and could have brought refugees without detracting from the war effort one iota so what you're describing is a deliberate effort to not bring refugees in from Europe and I'm stating you're taking this very personally because my father was born in Berlin in 1932 they got out to Jerusalem in 1933 so he was saved but the rest of his extended family did not they they were killed by the Nazis I'm sitting here thinking oh my god I mean and I'm not the only one why were these people not allowed to flee Europe let me add one more example perhaps the most famous aspect of America's response or non-response the Holocaust is the question of the failure to bomb the Auschwitz camp or the railways and bridges leading to the camp this was a proposal which was made by many Jewish organizations privately to the Roosevelt administration in the summer and autumn of 1944 the reason though the proposals began at that point was because in the spring of 44 two escapees from Auschwitz reached Slovakia and provided to Jewish leaders there and then to American diplomats Western diplomats in Europe provided them with detailed maps of Auschwitz they explained the escapees explained the details of the mass murder process and drew maps which showed the exact location of the crematoria and the gas chambers with this information in the hands of American Jewish leaders and other Jewish leaders starting in the spring of 44 there began a series of a private request to the Roosevelt administration to hit the targets on on these maps or at a minimum to strike the railways and bridges leading to the camp the reason that particular idea of the railways came up was because in the spring of 1944 the Germans began the mass deportation of Jews from Hungary to Auschwitz Hungary had been the last country in Europe with a major Jewish community that had been untouched by the Nazis it was occupied by the Germans in March 1944 and soon after that deportations began so and an important fact about the Hungarian deportations is that they really took place before the eyes of the world unlike earlier phases of the Holocaust which the Germans went to great pains to hide and therefore were not known immediately in the free world the deportations from Hungary were carried out at a time when there were still there were the Western journalists in the area and diplomats and and other sources so you can actually read in the New York Times in the spring of 1944 accounts detailed accounts of how the Jews were being deported and they were going to be sent to a deaf camp in Poland called us we sim as they called it in the times where they're going to be killed by poison gas it was it was in the paper almost in real time so with that secret out and with the information about about Auschwitz having reached the hands of Jewish leaders in New York and Washington the requests for balmy began so if you bomb the railroad lines then the Jews can't get to OSH wits so that would at least keep them from getting into the crematoria and into the gas chambers there is in Yad Vashem and some of my listeners who've been there I got there all the time the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem there's a very large aerial photo of Auschwitz on the wall showing that the the Farben Factory right near OSH whit's was bombed by the Americans and it's like two klicks away you know right there is ash with and the big question of course is why didn't the Americans do that so this is a remarkable aspect of the story and this will take us back again to the question of why did the administration go out of its way not to help the Jews so when requests were made to the administration to bomb the railways to disrupt the the transportation of the Jews to Auschwitz or to hit bridges which would have taken even longer to repair and thus would have interrupted the process even more substantially they received a response which was the equivalent of a form letter and I say a form letter because the essentially the same letter with the same identical language would was sent each time back to the officials of the World Jewish Congress and other groups that raised the bombing issue and what the letter said was that that the War Department today is called the Defense Department but the War Department had carried out essentially a feasibility study had studied this question of whether or not the the camp or the railways could be bombed and it concluded that it was not possible because it would require diverting American planes away from battle zones almost every word of the of these rejection letters almost every word of it was a lie we know from research by historians in all the relevant archives over many decades there was no feasibility study done ever studied it we also know from Professor Wyman's research and he explains this in his book the abandonment of the Jews we know that as you just mentioned the the oil factories operated by IG Farben which were part of the Auschwitz complex or just a couple of miles from the gas chambers that those oil factories were repeatedly bombed by the Americans and also to a lesser extent by the British during the summer and autumn of 1944 Elie Wiesel by the way as a teenager was one of the slave laborers who was imprisoned in those and we worked in those synthetic oil factories the reason the Allies were hitting the oil factories is because they were considered a legitimate military target but the mass murder of twelve thousand Jews every single day in an adjacent location was not considered a legitimate or worthwhile target Wiesel talks in his book night about how he and the other prisoners saw the American planes flying overhead and were praying that they would drop the bombs even though Wiesel said they knew that they could be killed in the bombings but he said they they all expected to be to be murdered by the germans any day and they knew that the mass murder process was going on every day in the gas chambers section of the camp beer canal so they prayed for the bombs to be dropped and the bombs were dropped up of course but only on the oil factories a few miles away so this brings us to a to a perplexing question again which has not really been addressed by previous historians of the this subject which is why did the War Department the Roosevelt administration why did it make up these false excuses and false reasons for not bombing the camps or not bombing the railways it they did not they did not undertake a feasibility study so why did they claim that they did um they would not have had to divert planes from battle zones because the planes were right there already bombing the oil factory so why make up all of this and as young historian this question perplexed me because in Mike's variants when a government official makes up some reason it's clearly a clearly false that means the real reason is something which is somehow embarrassing or unpopular and they're there so they're hiding the real motivation but clearly the motivation that they that they stated were not true so to sum up here we have a series of otherwise bewildering actions taken by the Roosevelt administration during this period suppressing immigration far below with the existing law allowed refusing to use ships that were empty to bring Jewish refugees to Haven in the u.s. not dropping a few bombs from planes that were already flying over Ashe wits so each of these each of these disturbing questions ultimately all emanate from the same source this is what I included and this is the case that I lay out in my new book that you should keep quiet but ultimately the the reasons for President Roosevelt's attitude and for his abandonment of the Jews ultimately reach back to a significant extent to his personal attitudes towards Jews and also towards other minority groups now what do I mean by that well the strongest clue that led me down the path of this research came not from histories of Holocaust but rather from an important book concerning the internment of the Japanese Americans during World War two as we know President Roosevelt in early 1942 authorized the mass detention of more than a hundred and thirty thousand japanese-americans none of whom had been captured engaged in espionage for Japan but all of whom were considered in Roosevelt size to be suspect that they could not be trusted simply by virtue of their ancestry they had emigrated from Japan or their parents had emigrated from Japan and therefore Roosevelt and his advisors concluded that they were potentially disloyal so this now has to do with the Pacific Theater right with the the what originally brings American to the war before they're fighting the Nazis which is of course the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and everything that's going on Pacific and the main internment is happening on the west coast correct in California most of the japanese-americans lived in California and there were some detention camps there but some of them were in other parts of the country as far away for example as Arkansas now keep in mind Italian Americans were never put in detention camps even though America was at war with Italy German Americans were never put in detention camps even though there was substantial evidence at least some German Americans weren't these sympathetic to the Nazis they were never put in detention camps so this was a mystery that was explored by a historian named Greg Robinson who teaches in Canada's an American historian and he wrote a very important book about 15 years ago called by order of the President and he set out to to explore a dilemma very similar to the dilemma that I've just outlined about Roosevelt's attitude towards the Jews in the Holocaust and that was Roosevelt was by reputation a liberal big-hearted humanitarian champion of civil liberties presumably how in the world could he strip 130,000 American citizens of their civil liberties forcing them to sell off all of their property for pennies and spending years in detention camps and sometimes in the the swamps of Arkansas and in the bitter cold of in Utah northern California during the winter and so forth professor Robinson found the answer so the question of why he why Roosevelt and turned the Japanese in a series of of long-forgotten articles that FDR had written in the 1920s this was during the period in his life when Roosevelt was afflicted with polio and was spending a good deal of time in Warm Springs Georgia during that period of recuperation he was a columnist for a local newspaper and wrote articles for other other publications keep in mind this was not Roosevelt as a teenager than what I'm about to describe we're not like offhand some offhand comment he made or when he was you know young and irresponsible or drunk he was in fact already a veteran politician in the 1920s he had already been the 1920 Democratic vice presidential candidate unsuccessfully this is just before he ran for and won ran for governor of New York so he was already a mature man and a seasoned politician with firmly held views on a number of subjects including turns out very strong opinions on immigration and extremely well we must categorize as racist opinions about Asian Americans whom he referred to as Orientals so in a series of articles at the time um he addressed the question of Asian especially Japanese immigration to the u.s. it happens to have been a a kind of a hot-button topic he wrote a number of columns about it for it and this newspaper in Macon Georgia and also for several foreign policy magazines and in these articles he argued that that Japanese were were incapable fully assimilating becoming full Americans that they were by race they were loyal to their own race and to their Emperor that they couldn't be fully trusted that they should not be allowed to own property in California that marriage is between Orientals and whites were a terrible idea very dangerous and other other statements of that sort so what Professor Robinson discovered it was that Franklin Roosevelt had very very strong anti Asian opinions very strong hostile opinions about a large you know ethnic community in the United States he didn't believe they could ever be trusted they couldn't be real Americans so where is the press on this though a hundred and thirty thousand people is a lot of people where is there an outcry at the time among the the media here in the United States not so much among the media some some liberal Americans did protest the ACLU tried to fight it in court but for most of the public it was wartime people were scared the Japanese had bombed Hawaii and there were constant rumors that they would soon bomb California so that the idea that there was a fifth column of Japanese people of Japanese origin who might secretly be loyal to the enemy was something that that took hold and and thanks to the support of public opinion FDR was able to maintain this policy of keeping them in detention camps now what does this have to do with the Jews well as I read the statements that Roosevelt made about the Japanese I began to notice a disturbing parallel to statements he had made in private about Jews how do you know the statements that he made in private so some presidents have left an ample record of their private thoughts the most obvious example is Richard Nixon whose tape recordings of his own Oval Office conversations became a gold mine for historians we know a lot about Nixon's attitudes about a lot of things including about Jews we know a good deal about Harry Truman's private opinions about Jews because there were periods where he kept a diary which many years later was discovered now Roosevelt was a very canny politician and he was very careful in general not to commit his private thoughts to paper so we do not have tape recordings of him saying that things I'm about to describe and we don't have any diary in which he wrote them down but what we do have and which historians not just me but historians have discovered over the years or a series of comments he made in private conversations with other people who then wrote them down now these are not these are not just rumors or fragments but these are detailed records made by people who are allies of the presidents and and we're not did not write them down in order to use them against the president these remained private they were in archives so some of the comments came come from members of Congress with whom that Roosevelt was close and with whom he was having all the record conversations and they then simply wrote it down in there in their own archives their own records just for the record but not intending them for publication not to hurt the president some of the comments I'm about to describe were made believe it or not to Henry Morgenthau jr. Roosevelt's own secretary of the Treasury there are comments as well that Roosevelt made at the Casablanca conference which was a meeting between Roosevelt and his advisors and and local leaders following the the Allied liberation of North Africa in early and this was at the conference took place in early 1943 they were discussing how the Allies would govern the newly liberated areas Morocco Algeria Libya there were more than 300,000 Jews living in those Arab countries before the Allies liberated the area many of those Jews had been put into slave labor camps or bitterly you know violently persecuted both by local Arabs and by the Vichy French the Nazis allies who had been ruling in the area so the Casablanca conference among other things there were private discussions but we have transcripts of them actual transcripts because these were official American government meetings so there were note takers in those discussions they're talking about among other things at one point what should the status of the Jews be in the in the post in the post liberation period because the Jews had been stripped of their rights they were putting these camps and so forth and there we find President Roosevelt this is early 1943 saying that there needed to be very strict quotas placed on a land whether or not on a number of these Jews who would be allowed into professions law medicine and so forth if they had to be strictly limited he said otherwise there would be a strong negative reaction from the locals that is from the Arabs it's not even talking about Jews immigrated into United States and he's talking about them staying in these countries yet imposing some kind of restrictions on what they could do yes and it goes further in a very tragic way in explaining why it was important to impose these quotas on the on the Jews and Arab countries he said you don't want to have a situation here which will be similar to what happened in Germany where the Jews were a very small percentage of the population but they were more than half he said of the lawyers and doctors and professors and that he said gave rise to the understandable reaction his words the understandable reaction of the Germans to this Jewish domination so Jewish success in societies ends up causing anti-semitism in this case you have the President of the United States an educated man presumably of liberal sensibilities looking at the situation of not in Nazi Germany the persecution of the Jews and seeing it as a kind of understandable almost justified reaction to what he saw as the Jewish over you know Jewish domination of certain German professions and German culture it happens that his statistics were way off but that's not reason even the point point is he believed it he believed that the Jews in Germany kind of in a sense sort of deserved the anger and violence that they in his mind provoked because they were too dominant in German society now that in itself is an extremely disturbing comment and if that had been the only comment Roosevelt ever made about Jews at that time then historians would kind of scratch their heads in wonder and and if you look at some of the early works in early histories of this period you will find historians mentioning that particular comments and kind of not knowing what to make of it what I began to discover in my research and some other historians also began to discover all over the last 10 years or so was that Roosevelt made a number of remarks in private in which again and again he kind of hit on the same theme that you can't let the Jews become too dominant or they will they will endanger the society and where they're living I found for example a conversation he had with rabbi wise in 1937 the subject was the mistreatment of Jews in Poland there was a excuse me a great deal of anti-semitism in Poland in the 1930s so one point rabbi wise went to the president to talk about not about the Jews in Germany but about the Jews in Poland and was there anything that could be done by the way the quota of Polish immigrants to the u.s. in that year was of course mostly unfilled so at a minimum it could have taken in more polish Jews but when Rosa went when wise raised the issue of the mistreatment of the Jews in Poland FDR responded that well that's because the Jews dominate the economy so naturally poles are mad at them so that's another example altogether there are about 15 such statements that Roosevelt made through different parties in different contexts from the 1930s all the way through nineteen forty three forty four they all kind of hit the same thing you can't let you can't have too many Jews in certain professions you can't allow them to become prominent in the culture you can't allow them to to live to concentrate in any particular area there are several comments where he specifically talks about the danger of allowing too many Jews to live in a particular geographic location there's a conversation with secretary Morgenthau a Morgenthau record recorded this in his private papers a conversation where Roosevelt boasted about how when he FDR was on the board of trustees of Harvard University in the 1920s he helped impose a quota on the admission of Jewish students to Harvard because he said you didn't want to have too many Jews coming in and influencing and dominating the culture on campus so it seemed to me and this is what I lay out in the Jews should keep quiet in in much more detail is that we have a pattern that Roosevelt again and again returned to this same theme they said the same idea about Jews and also about the Japanese Americans same kinds of things were that they were ultimately they could not they would not fully assimilate they could not be fully trusted that they had to be limited in different ways otherwise they would be harmful to America so his overall vision Franklin Roosevelt's overall vision of what America should look like was one that would be overwhelmingly white anglo-saxon Protestant with small numbers of minority groups like Jews and and Asians but in small numbers in very small numbers that do you have any idea where this comes from given like his childhood his background does this come from a religious place does it come from some incidents that happened to him is there any idea about how he develops into I'm gonna say it flat out somewhat of a racist books about President Roosevelt's family his parents siblings half siblings etc have cited many examples in which in his home there was a great deal of prejudice against Jews and and other minorities the kind of prejudice that you would I guess expect from you know upper-class white Protestants in the Northeast the United States in the early 1900's so in a sense it's not entirely surprising of course not everybody was an anti-semite or a racist not you know it wasn't inevitable that he had to imbibe these ideas moreover you know many people have let's say parents who might Harbor some kind of prejudice it doesn't mean you have to then accept it Roosevelt was an educated man he was smart enough I would say to understand that that racism anti-semitism were were vile ideas but from his perspective they were not vile from his from what he learned in at home and perhaps from what he thought he observed in the world around him he came to accept a number of very ugly stereotypes about Jews about Asians but also about others about african-americans there's very ugly language in some of his private comments referring to Africa African Americans as well so we're talking here about a man who understood the racism anti-semitism were not widely accepted in public discourse there were not he kept them behind you know behind closed door most politicians did there were exceptions of course and there was a lot of anti-semitism in America in those days but still the idea that Jews or other minorities deserve to be hated or victimized these were not ideas that were acceptable in the public realm in the United States at the time and yet many people harbored these sentiments privately you would wish the earlier President did not Harbor such sentiment but more to the point you would wish that he did not allow his prejudice to influence policy earlier we referred to Richard Nixon and Harry Truman and one could make the case that even though privately they said many disparaging things about Jews that there's no evidence that it actually affected any of their policies towards the Jews were toward Israel Truman is the first to recognize the State of Israel 11 minutes after in 1948 despite whatever it is that he thinks privately what's so overwhelmingly shocking and what you're saying here and what you lay out I'm really so well in your book that you should keep quiet is that he took his personal prejudices put them into American foreign policy and as a result many Jews died who wouldn't have had to die I mean the japanese-americans the first of all they're here already and they're interned I'm assuming that they didn't have a wonderful few years but they didn't end up in gas chambers so looking at it from a Jewish perspective and again from a very personal perspective of someone who had family there this is what is like to wrap our minds around what the American president went against really American policy in terms of the quotas etc and prevented the saving of at least as you said even if just the basic quotas have been filled 200,000 Jews from Nazi Germany now to be clear a lot of factors go into presidential decision-making and I am NOT suggesting that Roosevelt's private prejudice against Jews was the only factor in the process we're talking about obviously Department has never been a friend of the Jewish people I assume they had some say in here too well the President did surround himself with a number of senior officials who were unquestionably anti-semitic and we know that from the documents and the State Department as you mentioned was filled with with bureaucrats officials who privately were quite anti-semitic we know it from their from their private Diaries and their private correspondence Roosevelt did of course have a number of Jewish advisers and we've mentioned he had one Jewish cabinet member however only a certain type of Jew could rise to the inner circle of Franklin Roosevelt that was the kind of Jew who never brought up Jewish concerns or Jewish issues so although there were men like Bernard Baruch and Felix Frankfurter at the Supreme Court justice and Ben Cohen one of the architects of the New Deal and Samuel Rosenman the president's chief speechwriter and Jewish adviser and of course Henry Morgenthau although these men were all Jewish they almost never brought up any Jewish concerns to the president they felt it was not their place they were afraid of being accused of only caring about their narrow ethnic interests so those are the kind of Jews who were in Roosevelt's inner circle but at the same time there were many officials who were unquestionably hostile to the idea of allowing more Jews into the u.s. or or taking any steps to interrupt the mass murder process so Roosevelt had a kind of a self-reinforcing circle around him that also helped ensure what we call the abandonment of the Jews so there's a community in Israel that's named for Morgenthau which means mourning do and there's a community called tal Shahar that was just on my mind because one of the trips that I'm planning for the end of January we're going to have lunch there there's a phenomenal dairy restaurant there Intel Shekar and it's named for Morgenthau's so at some point he was helpful enough to the fledgling State of Israel that they named a community after him but he surrounded himself with a little echo chamber around him for the most part is this where some of your because you get many choices for a title for your book and the Jews should keep quiet is focusing on the other side of it is not just an FDR and the people around him and what he ends up doing and not doing but where the Jews fit in here the ones who could have said something didn't say anything and and and what you mentioned a few minutes ago is why the leaders the Jewish leaders of America at the time did not tell the people the Jewish people what was happening here why they knew this and kept so much of its secret look no president likes being criticized so it's not surprising that President Roosevelt would repeatedly try to get a Jewish leader like Stephen wises to hold back to refrain from disagreeing with any of his policies but at the same time one must consider the fact that it was wisest job to represent Jewish concerns so he's not one of the inner circle of FDR who's doing American policy he's there as you have Jewish Americans who have a job to do for America and then you have Jewish Americans who are supposed to represent the Jewish community and that was wise he wasn't Morgenthau so where is he on this the problems that I found in my research regarding rabbi wise are in many ways phenomena that we see in leaders of American Jewish organizations in almost every generation right up until this very minute and for example the fact that wise was not democratically elected is it something which we also find in today's American Jewish community were almost none of the leaders of the American Jewish organization so the presumed spokespeople for American jewelry almost none of them are democratically elected and or in a few cases they have a kind of a rubber stamp election but nothing that really qualifies as democracy so this this became a problem for American Jewry during the period we're talking about the 30s and 40s because Jews who were dissatisfied with Rabbi wises leadership didn't really have any options they couldn't vote someone else into power and Rabbi wise like a lot of Jewish leaders today was very reluctant to ever share his power or his prominence he was not willing to allow younger more dynamic more activist minded figures in the Jewish community to be part of the leadership of the Jewish community and this is despite the fact that wise was during the Protomen wise was I'm getting on in years he was in his late 60s at a time when the the average life expectancy for American males was late 60s he had serious health problems for the entire period we're talking about when I examined his private correspondence throughout his entire life I found that during the 1930s in 1940s when he really needed to be at the top of his game he was constantly afflicted with all sorts of illnesses and sometimes just pure exhaustion when I say exhaustion we should note that wise was simultaneously the head of the American Jewish Congress the World Jewish Congress the Zionist Organization of America I'm a synagogue the free synagogue in Manhattan and a rabbinical Training Institute the Jewish Institute of religion see here's a man who was spread incredibly thin and yet was not willing to allow anyone else to come in and share the limelight because and this again is a contemporary problem because in some ways he became drunk on the patent on the prominence that he enjoyed and the power he believed that it gave him now the sad the sad reality is that prominence and access do not always equal influence or power which is to say yes wise was occasionally allowed the a meeting at the White House but we find almost no instance one or two exceptions but almost no instance in which Roosevelt at all took his advice seriously was interested in what he had to say where's the responsibility to his own people I mean if you have access and power it's supposed to be to help whoever it is that you're representing yet this looks like a very big fail at a critical juncture in Jewish history rabbi wise was an ardent supporter of President Roosevelt's domestic agenda wise was a loyal Democrat he was a passionate new dealer he saw Roosevelt as almost like a messiah and that is someone who would save save the country from the Great Depression and and by the my remarks on this subject I am not discounting what FDR did in terms of leading America out of the depression and obviously leading America in World War two but the problem for wise was that was that he was conflicted he knew and we see this from his private correspondence we he knew that there was much that could that Roosevelt could do to help the Jews that wasn't being done and at the same time he desperately did not want to see anything done by those in the Jewish community that could hurt Roosevelt politically so wise never during the entire 12 years that we're talking about he never once publicly challenged Roosevelt's refugee policy even though wise knew that the quotas were not being filled so his loyalty to Roosevelt Wade was giving greater weight than his loyalty to the Jewish people you could say that because again and again wise knew the truth about Roosevelt but did not share that with the Jewish community he never went back to to other Jewish leaders or to the Jewish community at large to say you know the administration you know is abandoning the Jews or anything even remotely like that he he he saw himself in many ways as Roosevelt's protect her what he told American Jews about Roosevelt was essentially intended to soothe them to assure them that the president was doing all he could and that therefore there was no reason for alarm and no reason for anybody to protest now there were elements in the Jewish community that would not accept that line that could not be reassured because they they they were convinced that there must be something that the US could do well you had like the screenwriter Ben Hecht and you had other people but the Bergson's I mean you had Pete Bergson group you had people who were raising a call and saying something is very wrong here and this was a source of great anguish for rabbi wise when the Bergson group including Ben Hecht began for example sponsoring full-page newspaper ads calling on the President to rescue the Jews wise was outraged he was bother both because he thought it would it would irritate and and harm the president and because he was afraid as he said privately that such newspaper ads might provoke anti-semitism now it is of course the responsibility of a Jewish leader to soberly assess dangers and threats both see the American Jewish community and and and Jews abroad so it was part of wisest job to to try to size up whether there were dangers of provoking anti-semitism the the problem I would suggest is that when wise was confronted with evidence that his judgment had been mistaken he never less did not change his perspective and here's what I mean here's a here's a strong example of that in the spring of 1943 the Bergson group submitted a newspaper ad to the New York Times the reason by the way the Bergson group had to pay for ads was because the New York Times was refusing to give advocate coverage to the mass murder of the Jews in its news pages for any of you to think the New York Times is any different today than it was 75 years ago rest assured at least there's some consistency here so because The Times was burying and ignoring news about the mass murders the Bergson group had to pay for advertising space and they did and during the period we're talking about the Bergson group sponsored more than 200 full-page newspaper ads in The Times and other newspapers around the country the ad to which I'm a looting in particular was submitted with a with a message that wise and other Jewish leaders thought was so provocative that it could have could cause anti-semitism they felt that the the the the hex language could be perceived as anti-christian and so several wisest colleagues called Bergson and Hecht to their offices and pleaded with them to withhold the ad because they said if this ad is published it could provoke pogroms in the United States now Bergson was a newcomer Bergson was not an American he had come from Jerusalem in 1940 his name was not Burks in fact was Hillel kook he and the and the other leaders of his group which people refer to as the Bergson group but was actually the Emergency Committee to rescue the Jewish people of Europe um he and the other leaders of the group were foreigners they were they they were had either come from British mandatory Palestine or from Europe and so in this case they thought perhaps they should defer to the judgment of rabbi wise who was after all the elder statesmen of American Jewry and if he and his colleagues felt that this could cause pogroms maybe they were going too far so what Bergson did is he he agreed to withhold the publication of the ad it hadn't been published immediately because there was a wartime shortage of news print newspaper pages so the New York Times kind of put it in line while I was waiting in line the events which I'm describing transpired so Bergson agreed to withdraw the ad he said on condition that the major Jewish groups make the issue of rescue more prominent on their agenda and they verbally said sure we'll do that and then the months went by and as the months went by Bergson became convinced that in fact the major established groups led by wise and others were still not making rescue their priority and so eventually the ad was published was published that fool well needless to say the appearance of this so-called anti-christian ad did not provoke any pogroms it's at that point that one would expect rabbi wise to realize that perhaps he is fears of anti-semitism or somewhat exaggerated and the American public was not waiting to pounce on on Jews in the streets of New York because of some newspaper read a second good example of this by the way is the famous March by 400 rabbis to the White House just before Yom Kippur in 1943 this was also the brainchild of the Bergson group but organized together with the vaad hatzala which was an orthodox rest guru based in New York demonstrating at the White House was something which was unthinkable to American Jews in the 1940s of course today is commonplace but in those days you did nobody did that and keep in mind that most American Jews were either immigrants or the children of immigrants and they were still to a significant extent nervous about their place in American society so they didn't think that they could go marching to the White House with their narrow Jewish demands to help you know their brethren in Europe but by the autumn of 1943 the Bergson group in the vaad hatzala had reached the conclusion that the time had come for something unprecedented and that would be to actually march to the White House and they mobilize more than 400 Orthodox rabbis to come from all around the country mostly from New York but also from other cities and to mark through the streets of Washington and to go right up to the gates of the White House to plead with the president to do something to rescue the Jews now rabbi wise and other established Jewish leaders were aware in advance that this march was being planned and they tried desperately to persuade the Bergson people to call it off again on the grounds that if you do something so provocative have a you know hundreds of rabbis in with their beards and long black coats and black hats these very Jewish looking Jews marching through the streets of Washington and it could cause pogroms in the u.s. well the rabbis marched anyway and they did go up to the gates of the White House and the president refused to see them they wanted to deliver a petition the petition was calling on him to take steps to rescue Jewish refugees and they gave very specific examples of things that could be done including by the way using those empty ships to bring refugees back for temporary haven in America and other steps when they reached the gates of the White House they were told by a low-level official that the president was too busy to see them he had other other other appointments occupying him that day and it's the middle of a war so of course he's a very busy man and they had rabbis had no reason to believe otherwise so they were turned away but we today know the truth about the president's scheduled that afternoon because the president's daily list of appointments is a matter of public record historians discovered this long ago that in fact the President had a remarkably light schedule that day he had lunch with the Secretary of State at a one o'clock and then he didn't have another appointment until four o'clock the rabbis arrived at the White House at two o'clock that afternoon so he could have given them a few minutes of his time why did the rabbi's why would the rabbis turned away why were they snubbed by the president well the answer is because when a president grants somebody an audience a meeting he gives their cause legitimacy he draws attention to their demands and that's what the president did not want to do FDR did not want to draw any more attention to the plight of the Jews in Europe or the pressure by these American rabbis to do that on his administration to do something about it the president actually left the White House were rear exits in order to avoid seeing or being seen by the four hundred rabbis across the street he thought he could avoid the rabbis and their and their and their cause by sneaking out of the White House in effect but ultimately it turned out it backfired because in a very surprising development the rabbi's when when they were informed that the president would not even grant them five minutes at this time they openly criticized the president two reporters who were there covering this event they they said they could not imagine that for example four hundred Catholic priests would have been snubbed the way they were snubbed that they would have received such a cold cold shoulder from the president when they had come such a great distance and we're only asking for a few minutes of his time this too was unprecedented we said that marching to the White House was unprecedented for American Jews the idea of Jews criticizing President Roosevelt in public was almost unheard of yet the situation had become so desperate that these rabbis who they were not Republicans they were not critics of the president they were just there to please for for their governments that take some minimal steps not undermine the war effort but just something some something to help the Jews who were being murdered by the Germans and their collaborators and so when they complains when these rabbis complained to the reporters about this it became a front-page news story exactly what the president and his advisors including his Jewish advisers had been hoping to avoid it became an issue it was literally on the front pages of the next morning's Washington newspapers did that change anything what I described in my book the Jews should keep quiet is that that was the beginning of a of a remarkable series of events which catalyzed Congress to take an interest in the plight of the Jews led to congressional debates about rescue led to the introduction of a resolution that the Bergson group brought about a resolution calling on the President to create a new government agency just to rescue Jewish refugees the Bergson group realized just as rabbi wise realized that as long as the State Department was in charge of immigration and and Refugee policy that nothing would ever happen and nothing would ever be done to help the Jews so they believed that the answer was to take the whole refugee issue out of the hands of the State Department and put it in the in the lap of a government agency whose only purpose would be to rescue refugees and did that work the Roosevelt administration fought against the resolution tooth and nail and they sent one of their one of the State Department's top refugee officials experts Breckinridge long to Capitol Hill to testify against the resolution and he almost succeeded in killing it he testified that in fact the US had taken many steps quietly to help Jews escape the Nazis and he said that more than 500,000 Jews had come to America he said Jewish refugees have come to America since the Nazis rose to power so America was there any rescuing the Jews it was no need to do anything and the members of Congress who heard this assumed he was telling the truth and they shelved the resolution they voted to set the resolution aside and not even vote on it the problem was that Breckinridge long Assistant Secretary of State Records long was in fact lying that number 500 of over 500,000 was a wild exaggeration referred to all immigrants not just refugees not even just Jews who had come to America since 1933 so he had presented deliberately full statistics in order to mislead Congress that in turn set off a huge public controversy and interestingly the exposure of Breckinridge Long's lies also forced the mainstream Jewish organizations led by rabbi wise to speak out because this was simply too much to have a government official blatantly lying in order to try to obstruct rescue possibilities was too much even for Jewish leaders who otherwise were very cautious and were loyal to the administration so the controversy forced wises hands in a way he had not anticipated so by the end of 1943 and beginning of 1944 the rescue issue had become the subject of major public debate it wasn't just Bergson against against the Roosevelt administration now you had the major Jewish leaders on record speaking out about about the failure to rescue of course and much more cautious terms than the activists did but still the political the political debate the contours of the debate had changed in a very significant way because now it seemed to the public to Congress that in effect almost all American Jews were opposed to the government's policy the government had a policy the policy was not called the abandonment of the Jews although it might as well admit but the White House had developed what we would today would call a soundbite to answer any any critics who would dare question why refugees were not being aided and why the US was seems unconcerned about the whole issue of the persecution of the Jews the soundbite was rescue through victory it meant there was no way to actually rescue Jews but the president has advisor claimed there was no way to rescue the Jews except by achieving victory on the battlefield that that was nothing could be done until the war was won of course the Jewish refugee advocates said they said they said openly how many Jews will be left alive if we have to postpone rescue until the day of victory but that was the saying the soundbite of the administration rescue threw a victory there's a similar debate that was going on at the time within Israel between the different groups there whether because the British weren't letting the Jews into the mandate area as well they'd slam the doors shut so there's the difference between the groups in Israel over whether we should be fighting the British because they're not letting the Jews in or leaving the British alone because they're fighting the Germans in Europe and that's a bigger thing so there's a lot that's going on on both sides of the sea yes and and in fact the whole question of of the future of Palestine also does figure very much into this story and I explained it in more detail in the book President Roosevelt was not a supporter of Zionism and he had no real sympathy for the idea of creating a Jewish state he paid lip service to it when when Jewish leaders would ask him to send let's say a message of greetings to a Zionist dinner but in fact he had no genuine interest in it and when Jewish leaders including rabbis privately politely asked him to pressure the British to open the doors of Palestine to Jews trying to escape from the Nazis he made no effort in that respect during the course of the war his attitude was that he did not want to upset the British his allies so he was not going to pressure them even though Palestine was the or the logical haven for the Jews Eretz is not to mention the Promised One from the League of Nations etc and the Balfour Declaration and all of that that is way beyond this interview but that I hope my listeners know much about yes but even from a strictly Geographic point of view it would have made much more sense for Jewish refugees to be allowed in to Eretz Israel as opposed to them having to cross the Atlantic and find haven in say the United States but if you didn't want the immigrants in the United States then at least have them go somewhere else were or does he not want them anywhere and that's that's the bottom line that we keep coming to I highly recommend my listeners that you read this book as you can tell just from this last hour there is so much more that's going on here so much more detail we've just gotten a little bit of what the tremendous research that dr. met off has put into this and just I mean one last question before we go off how come this book never came out earlier it's 75 years 80 years and since these events have happened is that that archives were sealed up until now and you said that already you know when you were younger this is this is the question that was always in your mind why why why and finally now in 2019 the book has come out what took so long first of all the evidence about President Roosevelt's private views of Jews which is critical to the case I make in this book as much of that evidence has come out only relatively recently in some cases was found almost by accident the in general though this book follows in the footsteps it builds on the work of previous historians I was very fortunate to have worked very closely for many years with Professor David Wyman and we collaborated on an earlier book about the Bergson group and so of course my work is informed and deeply influenced by the important research done by earlier scholars but what I've done is I've built on that and explored other areas that previous historians did not go into deeply looked at archives that were not yet opened and synthesized material which until now was not necessarily understood as being part of a coherent picture like the Japanese being interred interred at the same time yes the connection between Roosevelt's attitudes towards the japanese-americans and his attitude towards the Jews is one of the important new arguments that I bring forth and the new evidence that this book presents and which sets it apart from earlier histories of the period broadly speaking this book looks at America's response to the Holocaust from a somewhat different perspective than earlier works here I look at Roosevelt's response to the Nazi genocide specifically specifically through the prism of his relationship with rabbi Weiss so this is a story of two towering figures of the era and how their relationship framed and affected the American response to the mass murder of the Jews during the Holocaust and if one comes out with an idea that FDR manipulated rabbi Weiss to a great degree that's definitely something that I pulled out of here of course we can jump in and have another three-hour conversation about how this relates today to a lot of the things going on with current administration's Democrats Republicans things going on in the Middle East things going on to tremendous rise in anti-semitism that we have this frightening rise now in the United States and if it can be stopped how the attitudes play in there is so much that's happening here and I think that your new book at least clarifies at least for me what happened decades ago but as I would imagine that as a renowned historian I think the reason that some people go into history perhaps does not just learn about history but also the lessons from history that can be applied until today so maybe if you have a couple of words about that and I know that's a ridiculous thing to ask of you but what this is just such an enormous subject before we sign off well the Holocaust as we know was not the last genocide every generation of Americans has to confront similar similar crises in similar moral dilemmas whether it was Cambodia Darfur and/or other human rights crises ethnic cleansing in the Balkans and so on every generation of Americans wrestled with the question of does America have a responsibility to intervene when innocent people are being killed killed abroad how far should the United States go should he use its power for moral purposes and for moral aims not just for for a strategic or military or economic advantage there is today a broad consensus I think in American society that America should make an effort where it can not necessarily going to war to rescue people in other countries from oppression but at least taking some action not not turning a blind eye for example recently when the United States carried out missile strikes on on Syrian Syrian chemical weapons factories at very broad public support so did so did the rescue of the Yazidis when they were about to be massacred by Isis just a few years ago so the American public today is intrigued and and and and and and debates this question of whether or not or how America should respond so there are very important lessons from the 1930s and 1940s when we explore how President Roosevelt responded the opportunities that that he had to rescue Jews things that could have been done but we're not done they very often provide us with lessons and with models in this case for the model of how not to behave when there's an opportunity to rescue innocent people from mass murder and of course what we have today that they didn't have in the 1930s and 40s is you have a state of israel which can be a haven for Jews but has also unfortunately become the lightning rod for empty semitism and that is another entire debate dr. raphael medoff thank you so much for joining me today and again where can people get this book if hopefully we've intrigued them enough to want to pick it up and read it for themselves the book is available on Amazon it is also available for purchase in Israel book stores in Israel to learn more about the work of the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies you can visit our website which is so we have the Jews should keep quiet Franklin D Roosevelt rabbi Stephen s lice and the Holocaust by dr. Rafael Madoff meed Oh F F thank you so much for joining me today on the Land of Israel Network thanks for having me [Music] Chanukah Sameach to all of our listeners let's keep our lights shining bright Happy Hanukkah from the land of Israel network at the Land of Israel calm hi this is Jill Hoffman host of inside Israel today happy