A friend says: “There seems to be some serious misunderstanding about life for Jews in Germany. The restrictions placed on Jews were no worse than those on Blacks in the South under Jim Crow laws. That is not to diminish the impact of institutionalized anti-semitism and the Nuremburg laws, on Jews who had been well integrated in all levels of German society, but there was no indication in 1938 or even for the first two years of WWII (From September 1939 until the summer of 1941) that Jews would be subject to internal deportation, slave labor and murder. Jews may have wanted to leave Germany, but they knew when they boarded the St. Louis that it was not likely the U.S. would let them disembark.”
Because of the Holocaust, we can’t have nice things, such as a safe country.
When the USA had high unemployment during the 1930s, they had no need for immigrants. It’s not America’s responsibility to act against its self interest to save people fleeing persecution.
* Europe and the U.S. can’t refuse the refugees because you never know when the Jews are going to be refugees again. The fact that there’s a Jewish homeland doesn’t seem to matter.
Hold on a second, I have to admit, the author isn’t Jewish. He looks to be a second-generation Indian. But he was raised in NYC and went to Yale, so he’s got the pedigree. Also looks like he’s the kid of an Indian politician and intellectual.
What’s going on here. Are Indians picking up the slack for lazy Jews or something. Perhaps, Indian and other smart minorities have figured out that white guilt works best when you bring up blacks and Jews, and not so well when you bring up Indians and Chinese.
Ishaan Tharoor writes for the WP:
The results of the poll illustrated above by the useful Twitter account @HistOpinion were published in the pages of Fortune magazine in July 1938. Fewer than 5 percent of Americans surveyed at the time believed that the United States should raise its immigration quotas or encourage political refugees fleeing the fascist states in Europe — the vast majority of whom were Jewish — to voyage across the Atlantic. Two-thirds of the respondents, meanwhile, agreed with the proposition that “we should try to keep them out.”
To be sure, the United States was emerging from the Great Depression, hardly a climate where ordinary folks welcome immigrants and economic competition. The events of Kristallnacht — a wave of anti-Jewish pogroms in areas controlled by the Nazis — had yet to take place. And the poll’s use of the term “political refugees” could have conjured in the minds of the American public images of communists, anarchists and other perceived ideological threats.
But look at the next chart, also tweeted by @HistOpinion. Two-thirds of Americans polled in January 1939 — now well after the events of Kristallnacht — said they would not take in 10,000 German Jewish refugee children.
