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‘FDR and the Jews,’ by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman
NY Times ^ | April 5, 2013 | DAVID OSHINSKY

Posted on 04/05/2013 6:46:56 PM PDT by iowamark

Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed the overwhelming support of American Jews during his presidency, and the reasons are clear. In his three-plus terms from 1933 to 1945, he led the war against Hitler, supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine...

Starting in the 1960s, a flood of books appeared with self-evident titles like “No Haven for the Oppressed” and “While Six Million Died.” But the most influential account by far was David S. Wyman’s “Abandonment of the Jews,” published in 1984. Wyman considered numerous parties responsible for America’s tepid response to the Holocaust, including a badly divided Jewish community, a nest of virulent anti-Semites in the State Department, and a distracted president largely indifferent to humanitarian concerns he felt were beyond his control, no matter how enormous the scope.

“FDR and the Jews,” by Richard Breitman and Allan J. Lichtman, history professors at American University, is the latest, and most thoughtful, entry into this scholarly minefield...

Early in 1945, following the Yalta conference with Churchill and Stalin, the president traveled to the Middle East, saying he’d most likely never “get over here again.” Roose­velt had always considered himself a master of persuasion, but his key meeting with the Saudi king Ibn Saud did not go well. Noting that Europe’s surviving Jews had suffered “indescribable horrors,” he assured the king that allowing them into Palestine would improve the land for Arabs as well as Jews. Ibn Saud was unmoved. Cooperation with Zionists was impossible, he replied; that door was closed. Returning to America, the exhausted president actually apologized to Rabbi Stephen Wise, a prominent Jewish leader, for failing “your cause.” Roose­velt died the following month at the Little White House in Warm Springs, Ga. — sadly aware, one suspects, of the unceasing bloodshed between Jews and Arabs that lay ahead.

(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...


TOPICS: Books/Literature; History
KEYWORDS: abreachoffaith; allanjlichtman; allanlichtman; auschwitz; biography; bookreview; davidswyman; fdr; fdrandthejews; fdrholocaust; holocaust; ibnsaud; israel; jews; medoff; pages; partisanmediashill; partisanmediashills; rabbistephenwise; rafaelmedoff; revisionism; revisionists; richardbreitman; richardcohen; theholocaust; worldwar2; worldwareleven; wwii; zionism
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To: B4Ranch

” He had a bunch of Jews working for him in his command yet he was killing Jews too.”

Sorry. No great fan of FDR, but he did not kill a single Jew. He neglected to save Jews, might have been anti-Semitic himself, but let’s make a clear distinction here between acquiescing to the evils done outside of the US borders and committing those evils himself. He did not lift a hand to save Jews outside the United States, but that is not murder, just neglect to save. The British pressured neutral countries to refuse to receive Jewish refugees, for fear they would end up in Israel (see Struma for most egregious example). That was considerably worse than FDR, but still not murder. Who were the murderers? Germany and its direct collaborators. Stalin for what he did to the Jewish partisans. Period. End of story.


21 posted on 04/07/2013 1:49:32 PM PDT by Eleutheria5 (End the occupation. Annex today.)
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To: Eleutheria5

None of the Germans tried in Nuremberg (personally) killed a single Jew! Just like FDR, who enabled Stalin to commit his crimes.


22 posted on 04/07/2013 1:54:08 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong! Ice cream is delicious!)
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To: Revolting cat!

The actual killers were mostly tried in Polish courts after the war. Amon Goeth (of Schindler’s List fame) was one of them.


23 posted on 04/07/2013 1:57:25 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: dfwgator

Didn’t know that. Others got positions in the DDR government.


24 posted on 04/07/2013 1:58:35 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong! Ice cream is delicious!)
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To: Revolting cat!

They gave orders to commit genocide, and planned its implementation. That is direct enough for our purposes. FDR enabled quite a lot of crimes, but that’s not the same as directing that they be committed. He needed Stalin, so tolerated his crimes, but had he not needed him, he would not have, and he would have been happier to partner with some non-sociopathic thug, if that was an option. Churchill would have been just as happy if there were no refugees to whom he denied asylum in Israel. He was far from an anti-Semite in his personal views. But he, too, was an enabler. Had he done something to save the poor refugees on the Struma, the Wansee Conference might have ended with a decision to call off the final solution. But that doesn’t mean he attended the conference and lobbied for genocide. Stalin, on the other hand, gave orders to liquidate all Jewish partisans, and the non-Jewish partisans were happy to oblige. Stalin himself didn’t lift a hand, but he was the murderer in chief.


25 posted on 04/07/2013 2:04:08 PM PDT by Eleutheria5 (End the occupation. Annex today.)
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To: Eleutheria5

I suspect one of the reasons Stalin’s defense of the Ukraine at the beginning of Barbarossa was next to non-existant, is because that was where the majority of the Soviet Union’s Jews lived. Hitler could take care of his “Jewish Problem” in the meantime, before eventually Soviet defense stiffened and ultimately turned the tide of the war.


26 posted on 04/07/2013 2:06:47 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: Eleutheria5
Stalin, on the other hand, gave orders to liquidate all Jewish partisans, and the non-Jewish partisans were happy to oblige

I didn't know that, do you have links to more information?

27 posted on 04/07/2013 2:12:12 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong! Ice cream is delicious!)
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To: gorush

Lol


28 posted on 04/07/2013 2:12:53 PM PDT by wardaddy (wanna know how my kin felt during Reconstruction in Mississippi, you fixin to find out firsthand)
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To: Revolting cat!

I read about it years ago in one of those paper things with pages, back when computers were still mostly cumbersome things that very few people owned, and Al Gore was still working on the Internet. I think the book was called Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan, by Nahum Kohn, portions of the narrative originally published in Yiddish in a newspaper under the title Ich Hob Gevolt Leiben, and contains some harrowing first-hand details of the liquidation. I might be thinking of My Private War, Memoirs of a Jewish Partisan, but Amazon.com comes up blank for that title. This fact about Stalin is also repeatedly mentioned in Forged in Fury by Michael Elkins.


29 posted on 04/07/2013 2:29:25 PM PDT by Eleutheria5 (End the occupation. Annex today.)
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To: Eleutheria5

Thanks, I’ll look for it.


30 posted on 04/07/2013 2:30:08 PM PDT by Revolting cat! (Bad things are wrong! Ice cream is delicious!)
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To: bandleader
The Great Hero of The Left also put loyal Japanese-Americans into camps!!

I thought he put the Jewish American Princesses into camps.

31 posted on 04/07/2013 2:30:56 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: Revolting cat!

Found it! Here’s the original cover art that I remember, too.

It’s called The War of a Jewish Partisan, by Yechiel Granatstein, published in English by Artscroll. It is all based on personal experience, and makes powerful reading.


32 posted on 04/07/2013 2:37:23 PM PDT by Eleutheria5 (End the occupation. Annex today.)
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To: dfwgator

Probably also due to the fact that he purged the military in 1937, sending some of the best officers to rot in gulag, and demoralizing the rest, and the fact that he honestly thought Hitler was his best bud and would never ever attack him, so he didn’t plan.

I once knew a man who lived in a small Polish village in the Russian-occupied side. The Soviet officer allowed German officers to walk through their positions freely. They took notes, made plans, and then attacked all the weak points and just rolled the Soviets up. My elderly friend escaped on horseback and fought in the woods as a partisan. He was 13 at the time.


33 posted on 04/07/2013 2:46:38 PM PDT by Eleutheria5 (End the occupation. Annex today.)
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To: Eleutheria5

I think Stalin knew eventually there would be war with Germany....but he had hoped it would have occurred after the Germans got bogged down in the West....one little problem.....France fell in six weeks. Then Stalin desperately tried to buy time by placating the Germans, while trying to build up his military...but Hitler beat him to the punch.


34 posted on 04/07/2013 2:48:36 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: dfwgator

There are some post-perestroika witnesses who were in a position to know, and say that Stalin was seriously freaked out and caught off guard. Saw it on History Channel program about transporting Hitler’s, Eva’s and the Goebels’ remains over half of Russia, with the people who did it providing their stories. Hitler’s skeleton ended up in the Kremlin.


35 posted on 04/07/2013 2:55:59 PM PDT by Eleutheria5 (End the occupation. Annex today.)
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To: jjotto; All
FDR did indeed have a fairly large number of Jews working for him, so much so the Jew-haters still refer to the “Jew Deal”.

I have done extensive reading about that era and have spoken to many Jewish elders who lived through it. Yet never have I heard any mention of anyone using the term "Jew Deal."

Of course, there was a stronger degree of anti-Semitism present in the US at that time, especially in German immigrant communities where Hitler had a following, so it would be no shock for those jerks to blame any social malady they could think of on "the Jews," regardless how much Jews were actually involved if at all.

To the best of my knowledge, no New Deal agency was headed by a Jew. And one of the "crown jewels" of the New Deal alphabet soup agencies, the much ballyhooed National Recovery Administration (NRA), was (mercifully) declared to be unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in litigation brought against the Roosevelt Administration by an unmistakably Jewish party: the Schecter brothers who owned a kosher poultry business in Brooklyn, NY.

Bernard Baruch was called the “Unofficial President”, and Jews like Ben Cohen, Felix Frankfurter, and Sam Rosenman were very close to FDR.

Never heard of Ben Cohen. Felix Frankfurter was Roosevelt's Jewish Supreme Court appointee, but there had been two previous Jewish SCOTUS justices - Louis Brandeis (appointed by Wilson) and Benjamin Cardozo (appointed by Hoover) - so the Frankfurter appointment wasn't groundbreaking in that regard. Sam Rosenman was Roosevelt's Jewish political guru; Roosevelt realized at the time that Jewish votes were concentrated in large electoral vote states, so he pandered in a superficial way.

All in all, though, the American Jewish community as a whole then was relatively lower in socioeconomic status in comparison to what it would become, and its political influence accordingly nowhere near as strong, which is one reason why Roosevelt could dawdle on the pressing issue of the plight of European Jewry.

36 posted on 04/07/2013 2:57:23 PM PDT by justiceseeker93
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To: Eleutheria5

Yes, he was caught off guard. He didn’t think the Germans would attack when they did.

If you saw the movie “Stalin” (with Robert Duval), it portrayed Stalin and locking himself in his room alone, for the first few weeks after the invasion, after Voroshilov, told Stalin to his face, that it was his fault. He had to be coaxed by the other members of the Politburo, to finally emerge and make a broadcast to the people.


37 posted on 04/07/2013 2:58:36 PM PDT by dfwgator
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To: justiceseeker93

Unfamiliar with it being called “Jew Deal”? OK. History’s not everybody’s strong suit.

How about Roosevelt’s “Brain Trust”? Or the “Gold Dust Twins”?

Ben Cohen was a prominent figure in the American Zionist Movement as well.

At the time, Jew saw themselves as supplicants (for lack of a better term) rather than equal participants. That attitude actually persists today in organizations like American Agudath Israel.


38 posted on 04/07/2013 3:12:02 PM PDT by jjotto ("Ya could look it up!")
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To: montag813; jjotto; iowamark; Eleutheria5; rmlew; dennisw; Daveinyork; ml/nj; All
[Roosevelt] supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine...

That's a quote taken from the posted New York Slimes book review. Not sure if it's even accurate; I don't recall ever hearing or reading about Roosevelt speaking out on a Jewish homeland in Palestine. (Generally speaking, historical revisionism is not unusual in the writings of the left-leaning journalists of the MSM.)

What did happen is that the Republicans first put a plank in their 1944 platform supporting a Jewish state in Palestine, and the Democrats - sensitive to Jewish voters - followed by doing similarly at their convention a bit later.

Whether or not the sickly Roosevelt, running for a fourth term that year, ever explicitly endorsed that position, I honestly don't know.

39 posted on 04/07/2013 3:33:23 PM PDT by justiceseeker93
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To: justiceseeker93

Why is that so hard.to understand? Like Stalin, FDR had an elite inner circle of Jewish collaborators doing terrible things, and the rest of the Jews were ignored.


40 posted on 04/07/2013 4:47:59 PM PDT by kabumpo (Kabumpo)
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