President Roosevelt's Talk About The Holocaust

Talk about Holocaust and how the American people viewed it. Talk about Roosevelt’s views. Roosevelt felt sympathetic towards the Jewish people, and he tried to help the refugees, but unfortunately his efforts were hindered by the anti-Semitic views that the American population and the national government held. This anti-Semitic attitude manifested itself in the minds of Americans in many ways, and although there was no legal discrimination, these beliefs made it more difficult to gain support for allowing immigrants into the country. The issue was that the public based their prejudice on stereotypes, complaining generally that “Jews have a lot of irritating faults” to specifically that Jews are successful and have too much money and that they are arrogant because they are “the chosen people (Selznick 4). These sentiments excluded American Jews from various neighborhoods and country clubs, restricted them from various jobs, and encouraged quotas on college campuses after Harvard …show more content…
Lawrence Lowell declared that a “Jewish problem” existed on campus when Jewish enrollment grew from six percent to twenty percent. When the New York Times began publishing articles on the Nazi treatment of the Jews and the masses of refugees trying to enter the country, the Americans did not express anger. They held a general apathy towards the issues. This indifference put no pressure on congress to address the issues, and it allowed the State Department to discourage President Roosevelt from speaking out against the issues abroad and assume that the issues would eventually calm down because anti-Semitism was old news in Europe. Additionally, the government was not pushed towards liberalizing the immigration laws. In fact, Assistant Secretary of State