Nearly 75 years after World War II, a contentious debate lingers over whether Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned his back on the Jewish population of Hitler’s Europe. In an extensive examination of the question, historian Allan J. Lichtman, co-author of FDR and the Jews (Harvard University Press), argues that FDR was a humanitarian but pragmatic president who weighed competing priorities. He finds that instead of being the anti-Semitic leader as he’s been presented, Roosevelt was a better friend to European Jews than his political opponents at home.
His decisions to help—or not—varied depending on the year and the realities of political expediency. He publicly backed a Jewish homeland in Palestine and facilitated the emigration of Jewish refugees to Latin America, including some five to six thousand to Cuba. Yet his activism diminished after war engulfed Europe in 1939, when he restricted the entry of refugees into the U.S., fearing that Nazi agents and saboteurs would be planted among them.
Join Lichtman, a distinguished professor in the department of history at American University, as he explores FDR’s actions and inaction during the dreadful time leading up to and during WWII.
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In an NPR interview, Allan J. Lichtman and Richard Breitman discuss the historical complexities and political compromises that make evaluating FDR’s response to Nazi-era anti-Semitism a challenging task.
