David Wyman, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 examines missed U.S. opportunities to intervene before and throughout the war.
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In the Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem, thereâs a section on this, and Canada claiming it was too full to take in the refugees.
The British Uganda Program was a plan to give a portion of British East Africa to the Jewish people as a homeland. The offer was first made by Joseph Chamberlain to Theodore Herzlâs Zionist group in 1903. It would have probably lead to another South Africa or Rhodesia.
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Sir Nicholas Winton saved 60 children from persecution in Czechoslovakia though he was heavily criticised by some Jews for placing them with Christian families. He himself was Jewish by birth but a convert to Christianity.
Religion, I tell yaâŚ
Whatever you do, youâll be heavily criticized by some.
Canât make everybody happy.
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That would explain why the Nazis sought to increase anti-Semitism by accusing the Jews of using capitalism to acquire power. Jews were widely accused of planning to take over the world, but in the interests of Jewish power, not the proletariat.
The Jews were simply used as scapegoats - everything in society that the ruling classes wanted to stop was attributed to the Jews. Thus I think you have it backwards. The attempt was made to blacken Communism - which of itself sounds like a beneficient philosophy for the majority of people - by associating it with Jews, and not the other way round.
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You had William Mackenzie King as Prime Minister. We had Neville Chamberlain. I think we need to cut Canada some slack. The Thirties had some of the most dismal political leaders of any era, which goes a long way to explain what happened (so did the 1900s, and that led to WW1, as documented by Christopher Clark.)
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No link there. Can you try again?
In any case Iâm not disputing anything about political Zionism but rather pointing out that your statement of âZion is a state of mindâ originates with Reform Judaism. To claim that Maimonides suggested otherwise is preposterous. If so there would be no need for him to qualify so many of the mitzvot which apply only in Eretz Israel in the Mishnah Torah. If Zion is simply a state of mind, there would be no qualifiers.
When you get right down to it that idea is only even possible if you ignore explicit Torah commands which relate to the land itself. This only makes sense if the Torah is âdivinely inspiredâ and thus we are back to Reform Judaism again.
This isnât to insult Reform Judaism in the slightest, only to point out that it is not historically normative nor historically the majority opinion.
I did not claim otherwise. I phrased my reply carefully in that regard.
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What follows is a quote by Henry Ford-
âIt is bad enough that Russian Bolshevism and Communism,should be so predominantly Jewish, but to confront the same situation in the United States is a problem which Jewish leaders have to use much ingenuity and deception to explain away or avoid. Yet the International Jew of America cannot be absolved from bearing sole responsibility for it. Russian
Bolshevism came out of the East Side of New York where it was fostered by the encouragement - the religious, moral and financial encouragement, of Jewish leaders.â
I really do not think it is insensitive to discuss the roots of antisemitism. I do think that it is important to discover exactly what people were thinking when they perpetrated horrors. If someone grows up thinking that the men who were responsible for the Holocaust did so because they were the âbad guysâ, then they are likely to follow that up with the argument that âI am not a bad guy, so there is no danger of my committing such actsâ.
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At the time of the kinder transports, an elite socialite named Laura Delano Houghtelling, married to a State Department guy, glibly remarked â10,000 charming children would all too soon turn into 10,000 ugly adults.â
That kind of implies that she understood that if the children werenât rescued, they would not, in fact, suffer that fate.
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We know full well what it would have led to. Britain needed literate working class people to staff the colonial bureaucracy and low-level mercantile class. Jews had a long track record as poor peddlers and as clipboard-wielders. But when Herzl declined to take up the Uganda idea, Britain brought in Gujarati Indians to fill this role.
Those Gujaratis became scapegoats for Idi Amin, and fled en masse to Britain.
Yeah, that was just fig leaf to justify their anti-Semitism⌠like when people talk about how âthose peopleâ (whoever they maybe) and culture.
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I do not use Ford, or even Lindbergh, as typical of prewar American views. It was just the easiest example that I could find of the assumption of Jewish Communism. I have some personal notes from interviews in Germany and what is now Poland, but I have not had a chance to go through them. It is not the main subject of my research, but a personal interest.
Most people in the West associated Communism with the Red Terror, which is a stage that has been repeated pretty much everywhere that a communist system has been introduced. The following is an eye-witness account of a tiny part of one such event, and reflects what would have been the fate of any class enemies or intellectuals had communism taken hold in the US-
âNor did the mere deaths of these men satisfy the Bolshevist assailants. The latter also
made sport both of the dying and of the dead. Particularly brutal was the murder of the Adjutant of the Military School, a staff-captain who had been seriously wounded. For some of the pro-Bolshevist nurses of the hospital took the wounded officer by the arms and legs and dashed him to and fro against a wall until he was dead. But in most cases
such " counter-revolutionariesâ were removed to a metal or a tanning factory for executionâ most of all to the Baltic Works, where they were killed in fashions so bestial as to lead even some of the pro-Bolshevist factory hands to stand appalled at the deeds, and to voice protests against them. For example, in a metal factory some Red
Guards bound the arms and legs of a batch of fifty cadets so as to bend the victimsâ bodies double, and threw them, bound, into the flames of the blast furnaces. And later the victimsâ remains were found on the refuse heaps outsideâfused with the slag. In addition,mass shootings and executions by other means took place in the factory compounds. Some of the corpses subsequently found there were too disfigured even to be identifiable. And there they lay (the
relatives being forbidden to remove them) until, in some cases, dogs and swine dragged them away into the open country, and devoured them. Only when the Bolshevists had been expelled from the district were police able to exhume some of the corpses,and have them examined, and reported upon, by medical experts.
Subsequently an assistant in the task of exhumation deposed before us that beyond a doubt some of these victims of the Bolshevist terror had been subjected to agonizing tortures before final dispatch.
And so remarkable was the uncalled-for cruelty with which some of those unfortunates must have been slaughtered as to afford a vivid illustration of the lengths to which class hatred and human brutality will run. For on some of the corpses were not only wounds of the kind which rifle fire ordinarily causes, but also wholesale cuts and stab wounds, obviously inflicted before death. And sometimes the number of such wounds was so large as to show that the victim had
literally been hacked to death, whilst in other cases the head lay shattered, and in others the head had been transformed into an almost shapeless mass in which the last trace of the facial contours
lay lost."
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That is one hell of an assertion.
Sadism is simply not dependent on ideology.
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The âred terrorsâ were very much part of the common perception of the spread of communism. Those with more knowledge of Marxism might call it âthe dictatorship of the proletariatâ Marx and Engels were clear in their position that the violent excesses of this stage must be sustained as long as possible in order to assure the complete destruction of hated individuals and institutions. Lenin took an even harder stance. He asserted that the old capitalist institutions must not be allowed to whither away, or be reformed. Violent and sustained destruction was the only answer. I feel confident that those western countries facing the rise of communist sympathies at home felt that similar events were in their future should communism continue to spread. And for those of us looking back, It did happen in China, Cambodia, North Korea, Bulgaria, Hungary, Mongolia, Ethiopia, Tibet, and other places to varying degrees.
I did not say that sadism is specific to any particular ideology. The current discussion is the state of mind of people in the US and Canada in 1938. The events in Russia and Germany over the previous few decades were very much on peopleâs minds then.
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I mean if youâre going by popular vote nowâŚ
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As an Orthodox Jew I try to tread lightly or speak very specifically when it comes to statements about non-Orthodox streams of Judaism.
Within Orthodox Judaism, majority opinion is important for determining matters of law and customs. That aside, the claim I was contesting was just wrong historically and phrased as an appeal to history which just didnt exist as stated.
I did not know that. I was under the impression that however much yâall debate over the finer details you ultimately defer to Talmudic authorities of yore. Is there really a theological democracy in Orthodox Judaism?
For Orthodoxy that is true. The Conservative movement tries to pay lip service to that idea or at least claims that they follow that idea but even staunch Conservative Jews admit that the quality of their rabbinic scholarship has been in decline for decades. Reform entirely rejected the Talmud from the start and currently does not even assert that the written Torah is at all binding. Their rabbis will sometimes reference the Talmud but more as appeal to emotion than anything else.
Iâm not sure Iâd use those words but there is definitely a system of ranking authority of courts and within the court system a minority opinion may be cited but by definition can not be the ruling opinion. What level of majority is required depends on the type of case (capital crimes vs civil cases as it were) and in the case of capital crimes a unanimous decision is automatically invalid IIRC.
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