Throughout WWII, it seems, the last thing the US government wanted
to hear about was the plight of Europe's Jews. That we were made to
listen, this study suggests, owes much to the tireless efforts of
one man who is little remembered today. In 1940, a Lithuania-born
Palestinian Jew named Hillel Kook, an organizer for the nationalist
Irgun organization, arrived in New York and immediately set about
lobbying the American government and Jewish leadership to take up
the Zionist cause as their own. Changing his name to Peter Bergson,
he first confined his activities to raising funds and public
awareness for a project to relocate European Jews to Palestine,
which met with considerable resistance in this country in part
because the government did not wish to alienate the Arab nations
and threaten supplies of oil essential to the war effort. He
eventually found powerful backers in Eleanor Roosevelt, Florida
congressman Claude Pepper, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson.
Wyman (History Emeritus/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; The
Abandonment of the Jews, not reviewed) and Medoff (associate editor
of the journal American Jewish History) offer a thoughtful essay
discussing Bergson's work and its fruition in turning an
indifferent government's attention toward Jewish affairs (though
not without cost, as they write, for more than one beleaguered
official threatened Bergson with deportation). The authors,
however, focus mostly on transcripts from interviews that Wyman
conducted with Bergson in 1973. In them, Bergson talks unguardedly
about the opposition he met from officials and anti-Zionist
American Jews-and about some of the unlikely allies he found, such
as the reputedly anti-Semitic publisher William Randolph Hearst.
("I mean, Nixon isn't as hated as Hearst was then. What right did
we have to decide who would save the Jews? For God's sake, we would
go to anybody.") Though highly partial, these interviews will be of
much interest to scholars with a background in the period, although
general readers may find themselves lost in the absence of
annotation. Nonetheless, a useful addition to the literature of the
Holocaust. (Kirkus Reviews)
In his landmark bestseller, "The Abandonment of the Jews," David
Wyman exhaustively detailed America's failure to help rescue the
victims of Nazi genocide. But one man, Peter Bergson, led a
tireless battle against that tide of indifference, making it
impossible for American leaders to plead ignorance of the German
atrocities. Now, Wyman, along with Rafael Medoff, tells for the
first time the story of the man who led America's most effective
campaign to rescue victims of the Holocaust.
"A Race Against Death" utilizes extensive firsthand interviews to
present Peter Bergson's own account of his remarkable life and
struggles. Facing deportation from America and threats on his life,
Bergson employed every conceivable method to influence policy and
public opinion: he personally hounded Congressmen to support a
rescue; placed controversial full-page ads in major newspapers
demanding action; and drew a record crowd of 40,000 to a rally and
memorial pageant at Madison Square Garden.
Award-winning historian David Wyman is the definitive authority on
America's action--and inaction--during the Holocaust. In "A Race
Against Death," he and Rafael Medoff return to this tragic era in
American history and chronicle one of its few heroes.
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