Jews and Obama -- pride and prejudice

Renew America ^ | September 30, 2012 | Joan Swirsky

[left that other site]

Agreed!

[justiceseeker93]

The more affluent American Jews were worried that all those Eastern Europeans coming over would be an embarrassment, and increase anti-Semitism. Indeed, there was a severe rash of incidents in 1938, even without any increase in immigration quotas.

The problem in the late 1930s, before the outbreak of WWII on Sept. 1, 1939, centered upon German Jewish refugees attempting to escape the Nazi regime there, not Eastern Europeans.

The dire straits of the Eastern European Jews did not begin until their countries were invaded by the Nazi war machine. Because of the distribution of Jewish population within Europe at the time, the largest Jewish losses occurred in Poland (invaded in Sept. 1939) and the Soviet Union (invaded in June 1941).

Between those two dates, other Jewish populations in both Eastern and Western Europe faced similar circumstances.

[Eleutheria5]

True, but I don’t think the bigot breaking a store window on Hester Street much cared for these niceties, or the comfortable Jews who had either escaped Hester Street or never lived there. The German Jews who eventually came were different from their Eastern European predecessors, but until they arrived, everyone was afraid of the former. So the St. Louis was turned away in 1939, and nobody minded.