September 5, 2023

This week’s mail brought two particularly interesting items. One was an announcement that a Jewish organization plans to honor two filmmakers for their recent Holocaust documentary. The other was a scholarly Holocaust journal that includes information which shatters one of the major claims of that very film.

The honorees, Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, co-directed the recent Ken Burns documentary, “The U.S. and the Holocaust.” In the opening minutes of the film, the narrator asserts that from 1933 to 1945, the Roosevelt administration admitted “some 225,000 refugees from Nazi terror, more than any other sovereign nation took in.”

Burns, Novick and Botstein have repeated that claim, word for word, in numerous interviews during the past year. It’s not just a statistic. It’s an attempt to defend FDR’s reputation. It’s a way of saying “Sure, President Roosevelt didn’t save everybody, but he didn’t abandon the Jews—he took in more than anybody else.”

Even if that statement were true, it’s a strange argument to make. Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust should not be minimized or excused just because other world leaders also did much less than they could have. It’s not exactly impressive if the president of a country claiming to represent high ideals of humanitarianism had been slightly more generous in admitting refugees than various despots and dictators around the world.

But what makes the Burns-Novick-Botstein claim about FDR and refugees all the more troubling is that it’s not even true.

The first clue that there’s something suspicious about the Burns-Novick-Bostein claim is its awkward wording. The phrase “any other sovereign nation” sticks out like a sore thumb. Ordinarily, one would say, “any other country.” Why insert the word “sovereign”?

In an interview with The Daily Beast last year, Burns explained the strange choice of words. Responding to criticism of his handling of the immigration statistics, Burns admitted he uses the term “sovereign nation” in order to distinguish Jewish refugee immigration to America from the fact that “people escaped to other places, like Palestine.”

But why would Burns want to disqualify Palestine from the conversation? Why resort to a technicality about sovereignty, in order to push Palestine out of the discussion? Why does sovereignty matter?

Even though Palestine was not sovereign, the ruling authorities there—the British—certainly were a sovereign power, and they had to decide how many Jews to admit either to the United Kingdom or to the territories under its control. Likewise, President Roosevelt had to decide how many Jews he would admit either to the mainland U.S. (the quotas were almost never filled) or to the non-sovereign territories America controlled, such as the U.S. Virgin Islands.

While FDR chose to keep Jews out of the Virgin Islands, the British admitted many Jewish refugees to Palestine during the early Nazi years, before slamming the doors almost completely shut during the mass murder period.

From 1933 to 1945, the British admitted a total of more than 250,000 Jews to Palestine. Additional thousands were granted haven in other British colonial possessions.

Tens of thousands were also admitted to the United Kingdom itself. In the wake of the Kristallnacht pogrom, the British took in 10,000 German Jewish children on the famous kindertransports, and an additional 15,000 young Jewish women as nannies and housekeepers. By contrast, FDR’s response to Kristallnacht was to temporarily extend the visitor visas of 5,000 German tourists in the United States (the president’s initial claim that it was 12,000-15,000 was a considerable exaggeration).

This doesn’t mean the British government was some great rescuer of the Jews. It could have admitted many more Jewish refugees to Palestine and elsewhere, especially during the years when Jews needed it most. But it admitted more than President Roosevelt did.

Even if Palestine is arbitrarily removed from the equation, the Roosevelt administration still doesn’t qualify as having accepted more Jewish refugees “than any other sovereign nation.” That distinction actually belongs to the Soviet Union.

And that bring us to the second interesting item in this week’s mail—the latest issue of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the official journal of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Writing in this issue, a University of Pennsylvania scholar refers to “the Polish Jews who took refuge in the USSR” following the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939.

Just how many Polish Jews took refuge there? There were “the 300,000 Jews who fled eastward” to the Soviet Union in 1939, and then another “100,000 Jews that fled or were evacuated” to the USSR in the summer of 1941, the author notes.

This is not new or controversial information. The number 300,000 has also been posted on the U.S. Holocaust Museum’s own website for many years.

It’s remarkable that the filmmakers who are now being honored by a Jewish organization did not bother to check the numbers before deciding to make their erroneous claim about refugees one of the major themes of their film. It’s equally remarkable that they have kept repeating that misinformation in interviews since then, even though their error has been pointed out by many critics. But acknowledging the facts would contradict their predetermined narrative about FDR and the Holocaust.

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Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. 

Colleges and universities are back for the Fall semester, but when it comes to the rising swells of antisemitism that has overtaken the campus green as of late, it’s never too early to issue report cards. Failing grades are nearly everywhere, with some of the top schools managing to attract the most fashionable Jew-haters.

In a woke minefield, disarming antisemitism is of very low priority. Another academic year and so many new accusations against Jews to learn. It’s positively exhilarating.

Take Princeton University. That’s where Albert Einstein ended up after fleeing the Nazis, occupying an office at a time when Jews were scarce on campus. Today, you don’t need to be an Einstein to teach there. This semester, Princeton is tarnishing its Ivy League credentials by offering a course titled, “The Healing Humanities—Decolonializing Trauma Studies from the Global South.” Listed on the course syllabus is a book, “The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity and Disability.”

Yes, I know: Neither the course description nor the book title is written in any known language. The protocols of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion is a friend of jargon and enemy of grammar. The consequences of eroding academic standards are apparent everywhere.

But this curriculum word salad is rancid in yet another way. By assigning “The Right to Maim” to its students, the Princeton Humanities Department is endorsing a book, and the public pronouncements of its author, that charge the Israeli Defense Forces with harvesting the organs of Palestinians, and deliberately shooting to maim, and devising ways to stunt the growth, of Palestinian children.

Any proof for these defamatory assertions? No, not necessary on campuses where critical thinking is only an elective these days, with citations and references merely optional. The author of the book was once asked whether she could supply empirical data substantiating her claims. She casually replied that her main goal was to get the attention of the reader. Well, at least she’s a good student of history, smart enough to know that scapegoating Jews never fails to attract a crowd—no matter the country, regardless of era.

Age-old blood libels are suddenly newfangled and re-packaged for the Ivy League. The blood of Christian children as an essential ingredient in matzoh was always preposterous. It was time for an update. Maiming and deforming Palestinian children is much more believable. The Start-up Nation’s accolades for high-tech innovation apparently betrayed a less admirable sideline business: cornering the market on Palestinian organs.

Her book also popularizes the “pink-washing” canard: The safe haven the LGBTQ community enjoys in Israel—unlike the barbarism they experience in Arab and Muslim societies—is at the expense of Palestinian suffering. Sexual and gender equality is merely a diversionary smokescreen that masks Israel’s far more unsightly human rights abuses.

And then there’s the City University of New York Graduate Center’s (“CUNY”) unfortunate hiring of notorious antisemite, Marc Lamont Hill. Remember him? Hill was fired from CNN in 2018 after delivering a speech at the United Nations where he invoked the genocidal lyrics: “free Palestine from the river to the sea.” After that he managed to secure an endowed chair at Temple University before decamping for a larger urban and academic stage at CUNY. Give CUNY credit for landing an accomplished Jew-hater, and for its consistency. The law school made headlines just a few months ago after inviting a commencement speaker who spewed similar attacks against Israel, and the NYPD.

These recent events at CUNY are all the more tragic given the long history of Jewish accomplishment at the city college system. Over a dozen Jewish graduates from CUNY were awarded Nobel prizes in medicine and science—including two women. Most colleges and universities in the United States have never produced a single one. CUNY was once a bastion of academic excellence and institutional integrity. Now it’s the home of mediocrity, and Marc Lamont Hill.

On the west coast, at the University of California in Berkeley, its law school’s student association last year voted to ban Zionist speakers from appearing on campus—even if invited to speak about something other than Israel.

Unhappy to report that the university is picking up where it left off, just last week, six students vandalized a Jewish fraternity house by leaving mounds of shellfish outside the front door and tossed into an open window. At least the vandals got the laws of kashrut right. Red snapper doesn’t carry the same symbolic insult. Given all those Greek letters, leaving traif on the threshold of a Jewish fraternity house is, forensically, not unlike a Trojan Horse.

At both Princeton and CUNY, these acts of implicit, if not direct, antisemitism were immediately defended by calls for academic freedom and protection under the First Amendment. Would Princeton have acted differently had a Jewish professor assigned a book alleging that southern plantations served as winter resorts for vacationing African-Americans?

University officials at Berkeley are now claiming that the shellfish incident had nothing to do with antisemitism, at all. Can it be that the littering of unkosher shrimp is yet another social pathology of the Bay Area?

There’s only one thing to be certain of:  Antisemitism on campus never seems to graduate. A student can major in humanities and yet walk around thinking that Jews are inhuman. Hatred is that adaptable. It refuses to outgrow adolescence. Maturity, actually, can lead to more hardened hearts.

History, remarkably, shows that antisemitism has been welcomed everywhere—including places where Jews had never lived. It is practiced by young and old alike. And nowadays, whether in the workplace, town square, or college gathering spots, antisemitism is no longer confined to inner thoughts and dark shadows. It is being more openly embraced. On campus, it resonates with professors and willing pupils. It’s a woefully unacknowledged crisis. Jewish life on campus is devolving into a ceaseless hazing ritual—the Greeks opting for something more Germanic.

It feels as though I had written a similar essay a year ago. Turns out, I did.

Colleges are opening their doors while minds are simultaneously closing. Custodial duties are being forsaken. The life of the mind is in the hands of haters. For Jewish students, the Days of Awe are lately coinciding with days of dread.

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Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law professor and Distinguished University Professor at Touro University, where he directs the Forum on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled “Saving Free Speech … From Itself.”