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Rebecca Erbelding’s Followers (26)
Rebecca Erbelding
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Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
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More Than Parcels: Wartime Aid for Jews in Nazi-Era Camps and Ghettos
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“The United States in the 1930s was rife with racism and antisemitism and suffering from the devastating effects of the Great Depression. Americans warily looked across the ocean at a worsening international situation and grew concerned about national security. Similar economic and security concerns - valid or not - have echoed throughout the decades in the face of most refugee crises since the Holocaust. No one knew the word 'genocide' until 1944, and few could imagine that a civilized country would systematically murder millions of people based on race or religion. If we don't have a solution to a refugee crisis or genocide today, when the world is far more interconnected and we have the Holocaust and other genocides as precedents, why should it surprise us that Americans didn't do more in the face of the Nazi threat? And indeed, when the war ended and the WRB dissolved, any lessons learned were promptly forgotten. The United States did not change the immigration laws or substantively address the issue of refugees for another twenty years.”
― Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
― Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
“John Pehle arrived home from work in the early evening on Saturday, January 22, to a predinner phone call. When he picked up, a woman who had found Pehle in the phone book asked him bluntly, 'Are you Jewish?' 'No,' Pehle replied, startled. 'Why,' she demanded, 'are you doing this?' Pehle later remembered the call as evidence of a specific strain of public opinion - one that thought the murder of the Jews was exclusively a Jewish problem. Non-Jews should not bother themselves with such matters, and neither should the American government.”
― Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
― Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
“The doors to the United States began to close in the 1920s. The Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which passed overwhelmingly with bipartisan support, was born from intense postwar isolationism and eugenic theories. The law capped the number of immigrants from outside the Western Hemisphere at about 154,000 people per year, a far cry from the more than 10 million who had arrived in the United States in the decade prior to World War I. The act also applied 'national origins' quotas and categorized applicants based on country of birth, not country of residence or citizenship. The quotas severely restricted persons from southern and eastern Europe, who had formed the majority of the immigrant population in recent decades, and kept most Asian and African people out entirely. Countries with large populations of Jews, Slavs, and people thought to be racially undesirable, poorer, and harder to assimilate were specifically targeted. Great Britain had the largest quota, and Germany was second, with a cap of 25,957.”
― Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
― Rescue Board: The Untold Story of America's Efforts to Save the Jews of Europe
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