Bearing Witness: How America and Its Jews Responded to the Holocaust »

One of America's most prominent historians probes the haunting question of why the efforts of the American government and Jewish leaders were ineffective in halting or mitigating Berlin's genocidal policy during the Holocaust. Focusing on the role of the Roosevelt administration and American Jewish leadership, Henry L. Feingold anchors the American reaction to the Holocaust in the tension-ridden domestic environment of the depression to the international scene. In these essays, he argues that the constraints of the American political system in the 1930s and 40s and the extraordinary events of the time virtually made it impossible for the administration and American Jews to react differently.

Jewish Book World

This book deals with the witness role of the American government and American Jewry. Witnesses here are those government, international agencies, and individual leaders who shared the historical stage during the Holocaust years. Examined here is the implication of the absence of caring for one's fellow man. Despite the many convincing explanations for inaction by those who stood by, none seems adequate to explain the stark silence while millions of lives were systematically extinguished.