The Historiography Of America's Response To The Holocaust

The history of the Holocaust is one that continues to captivate the minds of historians, sociology, political scientist, and popular culture. One of the many lasting legacies that continues to haunt the memories of individuals concerning the Holocaust is the idea that six million people could be exterminated by a “western” modern, capitalist society while the rest of the world stood and watched. Nazi Germany created the environment where Jews and other undesirables such as gays, gypsies, and communist began facing persecution decades before this state-sponsored mass murder campaign, which systematically started in 1941. The Nazis extermination policy that began with pogroms and clear directed violence was recognized and known by other Western counties. One of the most devastating accounts of human rights …show more content…
Historians have blamed the Roosevelt administration, American Jews, news outlets, and an overarching xenophobic and anti-Semitic American public. This culmination of historical writing features two main issues; the first revolves around the highly restrictive immigration quotas that kept Jewish immigrants from fleeing in the 1930’s, the second questions involves the decision not to take military action to destroy concentration campus, despite substantial evidence of the mass killings. This history of America's failure to assist Jewish refugees, whether justified in its content of history or not, is the founding paradigm that dominates the academic topic. In comparing anti-Semitic and Islamophobic, the historiography is new, yet vibrate in connecting or disconnecting the parallels in modern Europe and America policy on refugees. Historians such as Maria Garcia further have tracked American policy makings from the Cold War era on, highlighting