AMERICA, ITS JEWS AND THE RISE OF NAZISM

Arad joins other significant Holocaust historians, such as David Wyman and Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, but her aims are somewhat different. She doesn’t seek to assign blame, nor does she want to indict any group for the role it played in one of the most shameful events of the 20th century. The author attempts instead to understand and to explain why the American Jewish community failed to act more aggressively and to speak out more forcefully on behalf of their German Jewish brethren as the Nazi threat grew increasingly real and apparent. She traces the origins of a cohesive Jewish community in America back as far as the 1840s, when Jews used their collective voice for the first time to decry the persecution of Jews in Damascus. Her research depicts a somewhat muted response to the events of the 1940s, and the author recounts how, just when they would need their newfound, collective strength the most, American Jews felt paralyzed by their own insecurity. Although Roosevelt put an astonishing number of Jews in positions of power (more than 15 percent of his top-level appointees, according to the author), the American Jewish community’s efforts to mount a vigorous campaign against Nazi persecution were nevertheless thwarted by what Arad suggests was a course “fraught with obstacles as they learned to walk the tightrope of trying to balance their Americanism with their Jewishness.”

An excellent reference for an increasingly popular field.