The Jews Should Keep Quiet: Franklin D. Roosevelt, Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, and the Holocaust, Rafael Medoff, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia © 2019, ISBN 978-0-8276-1470-3, p. 315, plus notes, bibliography, and index, $29.95.
WINCHESTER, California –Vice President Henry Wallace, an eye-witness to the event, recorded in his diary that when President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill met in mid-1943, Churchill raised the “Jewish question” to which Roosevelt replied the Jews should be spread as thinly as possible all over the world, noting that he tried this method where he lived—Meriwether County, Georgia and Hyde Park, New York and his neighbors appreciated it. This anecdote encapsulates the mindset of Franklin Roosevelt.
Through eight gut-wrenching chapters, against the backdrop of the Great Depression and its hopelessness, the country’s immigration policies based on the same discredited racial beliefs held by the Nazis, and historical distrust of Jews, historian Rafael Medoff in his newest book, The Jews Should Keep Quiet, chronicles the twelve-year Roosevelt presidency (1933-1945) through various perspectives revolving around his interaction with the Jewish community in general and Rabbi Stephen Wise in particular.
Medoff relates how the Roosevelt administration played on the fears of American Jewry—suggesting they might be considered anti-American to oppose a popular President who sought normalized relations with the Nazi government, or telling Jews untruths, such as saying the Nazis have committed to mitigating anti-Jewish laws.
Wise and other Jewish organizations were caught in the horns of a dilemma: Is it better to support the President and keep him accessible, or compete against the will of the government? Jews in the executive branch were silent, how could they hope to do better?
Medoff is emphatic that while demonstrations and mass protests were kept at a minimum, held in check by Wise, at the urging of the administration, behind the scenes Wise and others were vocal, but almost exclusively to no avail. At a meeting between Wise and Roosevelt in the Oval Office on January 28, 1938, Wise broached the subject of the troubles facing Jews in Romania, Yugoslavia, and Poland to which Roosevelt replied that the real problem in Poland was Jewish merchants controlling the Polish economy. US Ambassador to Germany Dodd and a few others were among a handful who recognized the fate of German Jewry. Their messages to Roosevelt met with indifference.
During the 1930s America had no refugee policy. To placate critics, Roosevelt established a governmental committee to examine “the widening refugee crisis,” but he rarely consulted them or took their advice. Such callousness undoubtedly gave support to Nazis determination to annihilate Jewry. In August, 1942, German industrialist Eduard Schulte notified an American vice consul that the Nazi government planned to exterminate between three and four million Jews. After receiving the memo, the State Department, which never told Wise of its existence, believed it “had the earmarks of war rumor inspired by fear,” echoing the heartlessness permeating the Roosevelt Administration.
Many in the American Jewish community wanted action in response to the calamities taking place in Europe, but Wise, who gained prominence as an activist championing social issues, objected, arguing that such thinking did not take into consideration the broader political and social environments. He believed non-Jews were apathetic to the troubles of Jews in far-off places and with the rise of anti-Semitism, the Jewish community had to be discreet.
Yet, public crusading by Jews took place. Medoff relates the complex course of events ultimately leading to the establishment of the successful War Refugee Board, which convinced Roosevelt to open a refugee camp holding nearly a thousand Italian-Jewish refugees near Lake Ontario. He cites one such protest occurring on October 6, 1943, three days before Yom Kippur. Four hundred rabbis arrived in Washington DC to “plead for the establishment of a U. S. government agency to rescue Jews from the Nazis.” The protest had no effect at the time owing to the Roosevelt administration’s general unsympathetic attitude toward different races.
Roosevelt, for example, allowed few Jews to enter the country by placing road blocks in their paths. Persons applying for visas were required to fill out lengthy application forms as well as present more than fifty pages of documents showing no criminal record and no significant health issues. Additionally, they had to give “a detailed financial statement from some one in the United States who would guarantee that the immigrant would not become a public charge.” Jews were also denied US entry because a close relative was being left behind in Europe. The Roosevelt administration contrived an excuse that this relative could be threatened, thereby forcing the immigrant to become a Nazi spy.
In The Jews Should Keep Quiet, Medoff points out that by the early months of 1944, the allies were in a position to bomb the death camps, including Auschwitz, over which US plane flew regular reconnaissance missions. At this time, Wise, now seventy, was quite ill and other Jewish leaders stepped forward urging the bombing of these camps. Yet, not all Jews agreed. Chicago’s G. George Fox called these requests “emotional” for “demanding that the government of our country strafe the Hungarians for their brutal treatment of our people.” The Roosevelt administration denied this and many similar requests with an incongruous assertion that the bombing was unfeasible.
The Jews Should Keep Quiet is a historical accounting of lies, deceptions and subterfuge promulgated by Roosevelt and his administration on American Jews and their leaders together with the struggles of Wise, as a recognized Jewish leader, and the American Jewish community against the tide of growing anti-Semitism and a racially-biased president. Medoff, as a first-rate historian of the Holocaust, clearly communicates what my poorly educated immigrant grandmother instinctively recognized, “Roosevelt was a great president, except for the Jews.”
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Dr. Fred Reiss is a retired public and Hebrew school teacher and administrator. His works include: The Comprehensive Jewish and Civil Calendars: 2001 to 2240; The Jewish Calendar: History and Inner Workings, Second Edition; and Sepher Yetzirah: The Book That Started Kabbalah, Revised Edition. He may be contacted via fred.reiss@sdjewishworld.com.