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Belknap Press
February 2013
On Sale: February 11, 2013
464 pages
ISBN: 0674050266
EAN: 9780674050266
Kindle: B00BL7IVH0
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
Nearly seventy-five years after World War II, a
contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano
Roosevelt turned his back on the Jews of Hitler’s Europe.
Defenders claim that FDR saved millions of potential victims
by defeating Nazi Germany. Others revile him as morally
indifferent and indict him for keeping America’s gates
closed to Jewish refugees and failing to bomb Auschwitz’s
gas chambers. In an extensive examination of
this impassioned debate, Richard Breitman and Allan J.
Lichtman find that the president was neither savior nor
bystander. In FDR and the Jews, they draw upon many
new primary sources to offer an intriguing portrait of a
consummate politician—compassionate but also
pragmatic—struggling with opposing priorities under perilous
conditions. For most of his presidency Roosevelt indeed did
little to aid the imperiled Jews of Europe. He put domestic
policy priorities ahead of helping Jews and deferred to
others’ fears of an anti-Semitic backlash. Yet he also acted
decisively at times to rescue Jews, often withstanding
contrary pressures from his advisers and the American
public. Even Jewish citizens who petitioned the president
could not agree on how best to aid their co-religionists
abroad. Though his actions may seem
inadequate in retrospect, the authors bring to light a
concerned leader whose efforts on behalf of Jews were far
greater than those of any other world figure. His moral
position was tempered by the political realities of
depression and war, a conflict all too familiar to American
politicians in the twenty-first century.
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