A thorough revisiting of the record concludes that Franklin Roosevelt’s actions on the “Jewish Question” were mostly too little, too late.
American University history professors Breitman (Hitler's Shadow: Nazi War Criminals, U.S. Intelligence, and the Cold War, 2011, etc.) and Lichtman (Predicting the Next President: The Keys to the White House, 2012 Edition, 2012, etc.) pursue several telling currents in FDR’s record, namely the president’s ability to keep the private separate from the public, his reliance on Jewish leaders and his evolving enlightenment toward Jewish issues as he neared the end of his life. The authors trace “four Roosevelts” who emerged as the conditions of his presidency changed depending on the priorities of economy or war. In his first term, FDR was consumed by domestic pressures to repair the economy, thereby putting political expedience before the pressure to speak out against Nazi virulence or ease immigration restrictions against refugees. The second, more activist Roosevelt emerged after the landslide of 1936, openly backing Jewish settlement in Palestine, encouraging and offering incentives for immigration (to a point), and being the only world leader to recall the ambassador to Germany after the events of Kristallnacht. The third FDR set his focus on the war effort and passed his Lend-Lease program, keeping his work for refugees on the back burner. The last FDR created the War Refugee Board and supported immigration to Palestine despite Britain’s obstacles. However, the contradictions abound throughout—e.g., his long-lasting reliance on Jewish advisers like Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, yet failure to either inform the public about Hitler’s Final Solution or bomb Auschwitz.
A well-organized, accessible study finds FDR “neither a hero of the Jews nor a bystander to the Nazis’ persecution and then annihilation of the Jews.”Pub Date: March 19, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-05026-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HOLOCAUST | JEWISH | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Categories: GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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