Overview

In his landmark bestseller The Abandonment of the Jews, David Wyman exhaustively detailed America's failure to help rescue the victims of Nazi genocide. But one man, Peter Bergson, led a tireless battle against that tide of indifference, making it impossible for American leaders to plead ignorance of the German atrocities. Now, Wyman, along with Rafael Medoff, tells for the first time the story of the man who led America's most effective campaign to rescue victims of the Holocaust. A Race Against Death utilizes extensive firsthand interviews to present Peter Bergson's own account of his remarkable life and struggles. Facing deportation from America and threats on his life, Bergson employed every conceivable method to influence policy and public opinion: he personally hounded Congressmen to support a rescue; placed controversial full-page ads in major newspapers demanding action; and drew a record crowd of 40,000 to a rally and memorial pageant at Madison Square Garden. Award-winning historian David Wyman is the definitive authority on America's action-and inaction-during the Holocaust. In A Race Against Death, he and Rafael Medoff return to this tragic era in American history and chronicle one of its few heroes.

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9781565847613

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Throughout WWII, it seems, the last thing the US government wanted to hear about was the plight of Europe's Jews. That we were made to listen, this study suggests, owes much to the tireless efforts of one man who is little remembered today. In 1940, a Lithuania-born Palestinian Jew named Hillel Kook, an organizer for the nationalist Irgun organization, arrived in New York and immediately set about lobbying the American government and Jewish leadership to take up the Zionist cause as their own. Changing his name to Peter Bergson, he first confined his activities to raising funds and public awareness for a project to relocate European Jews to Palestine, which met with considerable resistance in this country in part because the government did not wish to alienate the Arab nations and threaten supplies of oil essential to the war effort. He eventually found powerful backers in Eleanor Roosevelt, Florida congressman Claude Pepper, and Secretary of War Henry Stimson. Wyman (History Emeritus/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; The Abandonment of the Jews, not reviewed) and Medoff (associate editor of the journal American Jewish History) offer a thoughtful essay discussing Bergson's work and its fruition in turning an indifferent government's attention toward Jewish affairs (though not without cost, as they write, for more than one beleaguered official threatened Bergson with deportation). The authors, however, focus mostly on transcripts from interviews that Wyman conducted with Bergson in 1973. In them, Bergson talks unguardedly about the opposition he met from officials and anti-Zionist American Jews-and about some of the unlikely allies he found, such as the reputedly anti-Semitic publisher William Randolph Hearst. ( I mean, Nixon isn't as hated as Hearst was then. What right did we have to decide who would save the Jews? For God's sake, we would go to anybody. ) Though highly partial, these interviews will be of much interest to scholars with a background in the period, although general readers may find themselves lost in the absence of annotation. Nonetheless, a useful addition to the literature of the Holocaust. (Kirkus Reviews)

Author Information

David S. Wyman (19292018) was the chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and emeritus professor of history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. He was the author ofThe Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 19411945(The New Press) andPaper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 19381941; the co-author, with Rafael Medoff, ofA Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust(The New Press); and the editor of the thirteen-volumeAmerica and the HolocaustandThe World Reacts to the Holocaust. He holds honorary doctorates from Hebrew Union College and Yeshiva University. Rafael Medoff is a visiting scholar in the Jewish Studies program at the State University of New York at Purchase and author of The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust.

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