Did FDR Really Abandon the Jews of Europe?

In writing about so fraught a topic as America’s failure to help the Jews during World War II, it’s well to begin by dispensing with the obvious: the Holocaust was a crime orchestrated by the Germans. Their leaders were propelled by a hate-filled ideology born of the humiliating aftermath of their defeat in World War I, a defeat they could fathom only as the byproduct of Jewish machination, cloaked in the twin (if also opposing) guises of Bolshevism and capitalism. As for ordinary citizens, German and otherwise, they were complicit in Nazi crimes; although the extent of their complicity still remains disputed, it is certain that the systematic persecution and extermination of Europe’s Jews could not have happened without the assistance and indifference of the populations of all countries under Nazi control.

Nor is the complicity of Europeans the only remaining controversy. Why did the Allies fail, or refuse, to save the Jews of Europe? Was it simple, bald indifference to the fate of the Jewish people? Or, given Nazi domination of the European continent and the overriding need to defeat Germany on the battlefield, did operational constraints thwart the possibility of any mission to protect or rescue the Jews? Or was it a combination of these and still other factors that left the Jews, hunted to the ends of the European continent, with nowhere to turn in their agony?

In The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust, the historian Rafael Medoff, who directs the David Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, wades into these questions with compelling evidence about one of those “other factors”—and an eye-opening one at that. No stranger to historiographical combat, Medoff is previously the author of The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust (1987) and FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith (2013), as well as numerous articles, postings, and comments refuting what he identifies as the errors of others.