Professor Penkower's latest book, Decision on Palestine Deferred, offers the first sustained, documented account of Palestine and the Anglo-American alliance during the Second World War. Firmly grounded in three decades of archival research, his spirited narrative offers a fascinating cast of characters against the backdrop of the larger Middle Eastern context. The latter relates to Jewish and Arab activities during the War, the grave threat of Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps, U.S. interest in Saudi Arabian oil, and the effort to achieve Arab unity. Zionism's shift to viewing the United States as the center of decision making in international affairs, and hence the Archimedean point for forging Jewry's destiny, occurred in these same six years. British anxieties about imperial security, while administering the Palestine mandate by means of a stringent immigration quota, jostled with the first American steps taken to formulate a stance vis-a-vis Palestine, and the region as a whole. The differing approaches of Churchill and Roosevelt to the Palestine imbroglio are also explored, as are the varied avenues that were then championed within the Jewish camp. The impact of the Holocaust, with both governments breathing the very spirit of defeatism and despair, surfaces throughout.

On 1 March, 1943, Chaim Weizmann, the elder statesman of Zionism, addressed a rally in Madison Square Garden to "Stop Hitler Now!." Three months earlier, a public declaration by the Allied governments had acknowledged that the German authorities were implementing Adolf Hitler's oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe. Some 2,000,000 Jews had already been killed since the beginning of World War II by the Third Reich and its collaborators, yet a deafening silence resounded throughout free world corridors of power.
Alas, Weizmann's and similar heartfelt pleas went unanswered. Britain's Archbishop of Canterbury and Arthur Cardinal Hinsley called on that same occasion for speedy deeds to meet the most appalling horror. Faced with the crime of the Holocaust - Christianity and Western humanism abdicated moral responsibility to try to save an innocent people. Without that decay of conscience, already evident in the years between Hitler's advent to power and the Nazi blitzkrieg against Poland, European Jewry would not have gone abandoned into the night.
Over the past two decades, access to most of the archives has enabled historians to authenticate this grim truth. Political expediency reigned supreme in the war counsels of those governments which alone could have checked the tempo of Hitler's Final Solution of the Jewish problem.

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the beleaguered Jewish people, as a phoenix ascending of ancient legend, achieved national self-determination in the reborn State of Israel within three years of the end of World War II and of the Holocaust. They include the pivotal 1946 World Zionist Congress, the contributions of Jacob Robinson and Clark M. Eichelberger to Israel's sovereign renewal, American Jewry's crusade to save a Jewish state, the effort to create a truce and trusteeship for Palestine, and Judah Magnes's final attempt to create a federated state there. Joining extensive archival research and a lucid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

This extensively-researched collection of essays lucidly explores how members of the ever-beleaguered Jewish people grappled with their identities during the past century in the United States and in Eretz Israel, the new centers of JewryaEURO (TM)s long historical experience. With the pivotal 1903 Kishinev pogrom setting the stage, the author proceeds to examine how the Land of Promise across the Atlantic exerted different influences on Abraham Selmanovitz, Felix Frankfurter, the founders of the American Council for Judaism, and Arthur Hays Sulzberger. Professor Penkower then shows how the prospect of nationalism in the biblical Promised Land engendered other tensions and transformations, ranging from the plight of Hayim Nahman Bialik, to rivalry within the Orthodox Jewish camp, to on-going strife between the political Left and Right over the nature of the emerging Jewish state.

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the survivors of the Holocaust contended with life after the darkest night in Jewish history. They include the Earl Harrison mission and significant report, the effort to keep Europe's borders open to refugee infiltration, the murder of the first Jew in Germany after V-E Day and its aftermath, and the iconic sculptures of Nathan Rapoport and Poland's landscape of Holocaust memory up to the present day. Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the survivors of the Holocaust contended with life after the darkest night in Jewish history. They include the Earl Harrison mission and significant report, the effort to keep Europe's borders open to refugee infiltration, the murder of the first Jew in Germany after V-E Day and its aftermath, and the iconic sculptures of Nathan Rapoport and Poland's landscape of Holocaust memory up to the present day. Joining extensive archival research and a limpid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

The chapters in this volume examine a few facets in the drama of how the beleaguered Jewish people, as a phoenix ascending of ancient legend, achieved national self-determination in the reborn State of Israel within three years of the end of World War II and of the Holocaust. They include the pivotal 1946 World Zionist Congress, the contributions of Jacob Robinson and Clark M. Eichelberger to Israel's sovereign renewal, American Jewry's crusade to save a Jewish state, the effort to create a truce and trusteeship for Palestine, and Judah Magnes's final attempt to create a federated state there. Joining extensive archival research and a lucid prose, Professor Monty Noam Penkower again displays a definitive mastery of his craft.

Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine and in the Arab states, including how the Palestine quagmire became a pawn in inter-Arab feuds; British and American responses both official and public; the role of Holocaust survivors; the context of the Cold War; and the saga as it unfolded in the corridors of the United Nations. Joining extensive archival research to a lucid prose, the two volumes offer a riveting conclusion to his Palestine in Turmoil and Decision on Palestine Deferred.

Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine and in the Arab states, including how the Palestine quagmire became a pawn in inter-Arab feuds; British and American responses both official and public; the role of Holocaust survivors; the context of the Cold War; and the saga as it unfolded in the corridors of the United Nations. Joining extensive archival research to a lucid prose, the two volumes offer a riveting conclusion to his Palestine in Turmoil and Decision on Palestine Deferred.

Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine and in the Arab states, including how the Palestine quagmire became a pawn in inter-Arab feuds; British and American responses both official and public; the role of Holocaust survivors; the context of the Cold War; and the saga as it unfolded in the corridors of the United Nations. Joining extensive archival research to a lucid prose, the two volumes offer a riveting conclusion to his Palestine in Turmoil and Decision on Palestine Deferred.

Seventy years after the creation of the State of Israel, Palestine to Israel: Mandate to State, 1945-1948 offers the definitive narrative of the achievement of Jewish sovereignty in the beleaguered Promised Land. Professor Monty Noam Penkower explores developments in Palestine and in the Arab states, including how the Palestine quagmire became a pawn in inter-Arab feuds; British and American responses both official and public; the role of Holocaust survivors; the context of the Cold War; and the saga as it unfolded in the corridors of the United Nations. Joining extensive archival research to a lucid prose, the two volumes offer a riveting conclusion to his Palestine in Turmoil and Decision on Palestine Deferred.