Well Worth Saving: American Universities’ Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe

by Laurel Leff

A harrowing account of the profoundly consequential decisions American universities made about refugee scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe

The United States’ role in saving Europe’s intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not.

To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed “not worth saving” and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era.

Genres: Holocaust, Nonfiction, History

368 pages, Kindle Edition

First published December 3, 2019

About the author

Laurel Leff is associate director of the Jewish Studies Program and associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University. She is the author of Buried by The Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper.

Reviews

[Tracie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Leff writes of the fates of scholars and researchers who were not given refugee status when more of them could have been saved with non-quota visas. Some of the leaders of our most "prestigious" colleges and universities and the state department rejected academics who had lost jobs, especially women. In 1934 Harvard turned down money from the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars to hire refugee scholars. Harvard was the only University to do so, but did hire 45 scholars through the war years. The California Institute of Technology with 850 students hired fourteen refugee scholars. The American Association of University Women, after great effort, were able to place only five women. So, of course some American associations, foundations and schools had members who worked tirelessly to get people to safety, for instance the Rockefeller Foundation despite some of its own organizational leaders spent 1.4 million on 303 refugee scholars between 1933 to 1945, but there were also turf wars between groups. Historically Black colleges were willing to hire refugee scholars. Leff also tells of the work done in Great Britain to bring educators to safety and explains the American immigration laws and the "two years of teaching" rule that hindered so many, especially since many Jewish professors were forced out of their work by the Nazi governments when they invaded other countries. It made me inordinately happy that neurologist Gerald Steiner was able to immigrate in 1936 and work on multiple sclerosis research at my Wayne State University in Detroit even though I wasn't born yet. Leff tries to balance her book with the harsh realities facing many Americans still in the 1930's and how actual fifth column espionage took place and fed people's fears, but some of the just racial meanness and comments of people in authoritative positions is so hard to read. I did have a hard track keeping track of people and was glad of the appendix of Displaced Scholars and How They Fared, at the end of the book because I did find myself flipping back and forth.

[Carmen212 · Rating 4 out of 5]

A difficult book to read for several reasons: it is dense, Ms. Leff leaves no stone unturned and it was confusing for me how the various refugee help organizations overlapped or failed. The story itself is so so sad. Yes, Marc Chagall and Hannah Arendt were gotten out but so many hundreds were not. The anti-semitism in the US during the 30s and 40s wormed its way into all institutions--colleges and universities, State Department, FDR's cabinet. Women had an especially hard time as well as Jews who "looked too Jewish" or had "Jewish personalities" and the fear that one Jew would open the floodgates. Imagine! a faculty with two or heaven forfend four Jewish professors.

I have been reading Holocaust Studies for about 60 years and I STILL don't know why Jews had a target on their backs--peasants, kings, all manner of just plain ordinary folks.

[Daryl Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great history of saving many Jewish people before and during WW2. The powerful position the Rockefeller group played in saving many.

A very good read