This edited collection of more than one hundred primary sources from the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s--including newspaper and magazine articles, popular culture materials, and government records--reveals how Americans debated their responsibility to respond to Nazism. It includes valuable resources for students and historians seeking to shed light on this dark era in world history.

The first comprehensive volume to teach about America's response to the Holocaust through visual media, America and the Holocaust: A Documentary History explores the complex subject through the lens of one hundred important documents that help illuminate and amplify key episodes and issues. Each chapter pivots on five key documents: two in image form and three in text form. Individual introductions that contextualize the documents are followed by explanatory text, analysis of historical implications, and suggestions for further reading. A concluding state-of-the-field essay documents how scholars have arrived at the presented information. A complementary teacher's guide with questions for discussion is available online. The twenty chapters address a broad range of subjects and events, among them America's response to Hitler's rise, U.S. public opinion about Jews, immigration policy, the Wagner-Rogers bill to save children, American rescuers, news coverage of atrocities, American Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust, the campaign for U.S. rescue action, the question of bombing Auschwitz, and liberation. Viewing real documents as a means to understanding core issues will deepen reader involvement with this material. High school and college students as well as general readers of all levels of knowledge will be engaged in understanding this crucial chapter in American history and weighing questions regarding mass atrocities in our own era.

In this volume Yehuda Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. In this volume Yehudi Bauer describes the efforts made to aid European victims of World War II by the New York-based American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, American Jewry's chief representative abroad. Drawing on the mass of unpublished material in the JDC archives and other repositories, as well as on his thorough knowledge of recent and continuing research into the Holocaust, he focuses alternately on the personalities and institutional decisions in New York and their effects on the JDC workers and their rescue efforts in Europe. He balances personal stories with a country-by-country account of the fate of Jews through ought the war years: the grim statistics of millions deported and killed are set in the context of the hopes and frustrations of the heroic individuals and small groups who actively worked to prevent the Nazis' Final Solution. This study is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand the American Jewish response to European events from 1939 to 1945. Bauer confronts the tremendous moral and historical questions arising from JDC's activities. How great was the danger? Who should be saved first? Was it justified to use illegal or extralegal means? What country would accept Jewish refugees? His analysis also raises an issue which perhaps can never be answered: could American Jews have done more if they had grasped the reality of the Holocaust?

This study of American policies towards the European Jews surviving the holocaust analyzes displaced persons legislation enacted after the war and examines the role of American Jews in countering anti-Semitism

This volume incorporates studies of the persecution of the Jews in Germany, the respective responses of the German-American Press and the American-Jewish Press during the emergence of Nazism, and the subsequent issues of rescue during the holocaust and policies towards the displaced.

This work offers insights into how specific films influenced the Americanization of the Holocaust and how the medium per se helped seed that event into the public consciousness. In addition to an in-depth study on films produced for both theatrical release and TV since 1937 - including The Great Dictator, Cabaret, Julia, and the mini-series Holocaust - this work provides an analysis of Schindler's List and the debate over the merit of Spielberg's vision of the Holocaust. It also examines more thoroughly made-for-television movies, such as Escape From Sobibor, Playing For Time, and War and Remembrance. A special chapter on The Diary of Anne Frank discusses the evolution of that singularly European work into a universal symbol. Paying special attention to the tumultuous 1960s in America, it assesses the effect of the era on Holocaust films made during that time. It also discusses how these films helped integrate the Holocaust into the fabric of American society, transforming it into a metaphor for modern suffering. Finally, the work explores cinema in relation to the Americanization of the Jewish image.

This most complete study to date of American press reactions to the Holocaust sets forth in abundant detail how the press nationwide played down or even ignored reports of Jewish persecutions over a twelve-year period.