Description

Aaron Berman takes a moderate and measured approach to one of the most emotional issues in American Jewish historiography, namely, the response of American Jews to Nazism and the extermination of European Jewry.In remarkably large numbers, American Jews joined the Zionist crusade to create a Jewish state that would finally end the problem of Jewish homelessness, which they believed was the basic cause not only of the Holocaust but of all anti-Semitism. Though American Zionists could justly claim credit for the successful establishment of Israel in 1948, this triumph was not without cost. Their insistence on including a demand for Jewish statehood in any proposal to aid European Jewry politicized the rescue issue and made it impossible to appeal for American aid on purely humanitarian grounds.