Did America Abandon the Jews?

Paper Summary:

The paper explains that in "The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust", David Wyman argues that the United States abandoned the Jews because of a combination of anti-Semitism and indifference. In this paper, the writer contends that Wyman ignores the economic distress caused by the Great Depression and the fact that the US rarely makes military interventions for humanitarian purposes. The writer therefore believes that it is an overly simplistic and historically uninformed argument to propose that the US is responsible for the Jews and abandoned them to the Nazis.

From the Paper:

"In his book, The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, David Wyman argues that the political and military leadership of the United States could have saved thousands - even millions - of European Jews by taking early steps of intervention against the Nazis. For Wyman, America's inaction is tantamount to complicity in these horrific crimes against humanity. He argues that the United States abandoned the Jews because of a combination of anti-Semitism and indifference to anything that was not considered to be of strategic importance to the United States. The fact is that the United States of the 1930s and early 1940s was a much different country than the world power it is today. It was an isolationist country that had just struggled through the Great Depression."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Chang, Iris. The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II. New York: Penguin, 1998.
• Power, Samantha. "A Problem From Hell: American and the Age of Genocide." Center for American Progress. http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=228409
• Wyman, David S. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945. New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

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