Everything I've read has stated that FDR was pretty supportive of Jews.
HistoryNet wrote:To his critics, Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust was epitomized by his June 1939 decision to refuse political asylum to more than 900 passengers aboard the German ocean liner St. Louis. The passengers, nearly all of them Jewish refugees, had the lights of Miami in sight when the United States government refused them permission to disembark. Roosevelt did not respond to pleas for help. The ship returned to Europe, and the Holocaust claimed more than a third of those who returned to the Continent.
...A year before the St. Louis affair, FDR prodded the State Department to allow tens of thousands of Jews to immigrate from Germany and Austria, and developed plans to turn the Western democracies into a huge safety net. "Roosevelt was a man of grand vision who wanted to resettle a much larger number of refugees," writes Richard Breitman, an American University historian who helped edit the volume. "[But] his willingness to take action varied sharply according to political and military circumstances."
As early as the spring of 1938, according to McDonald's papers, Roosevelt began talking about a plan to rescue millions of Jews from Nazi Germany and divide them between a group of 10 democratic countries. Later that year, Roosevelt promised McDonald that he would ask Congress to appropriate $150 million to help resettle refugees around the world. In May 1939, only a month before the St. Louis incident, McDonald was present when FDR warned his advisors that the situation of the Jews in Germany was growing critical. "It was not so much a question of money," McDonald recorded the president saying, "as it was of actual lives."
McDonald, the high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations in the 1930s, had no tolerance for foot-dragging bureaucrats or timid world leaders. He had resigned from his post in 1935 over the organization's unwillingness to help Jews in Nazi Germany. And he had no reason to make excuses for Roosevelt. Which, historians say, is what makes his decision to join the president's advisory committee on refugees in 1938—and his impressions of a president he believed was quite concerned about the fate of European Jews—so important.
So why didn't Roosevelt act? McDonald blamed the intractable politics of the time. In early 1939, with the St. Louis about to set sail, FDR refused to endorse a bill that would have brought 20,000 German Jewish children into the United States outside the immigration quota. From McDonald's perspective, FDR saw the bill as a mere gesture—not a solution. In the face of strong public opposition and an intransigent State Department, both Roosevelt and McDonald also recognized that the bill was doomed to fail. "The problem was that most of the initiatives to resettle refugees…proved impossible, met substantial resistance abroad, or developed very slowly," Breitman and his coeditors write. "The outbreak of war destroyed most of what opportunities remained."
By 1940, Roosevelt abandoned his major resettlement efforts when he was forced to change his focus from humanitarian action to national security. That transition disappointed McDonald so much that he voted for Wendell Willkie in that year's presidential election.
Nonetheless, after FDR won, McDonald stayed on as the president's adviser, doing what he could to help Europe's Jews. "We definitely have a sense that McDonald felt he and Roosevelt were, if not on the same page, at least in the same chapter," Breitman told World War II. "He eventually realized that no one had the power to stop the Holocaust." Sadly, that included the president.
But hey...why should we listen to the commissioner for refugees in the League of Nations at the time, when Kman can cite
Lew Rockwell's website?
I mean, look how rock solid some of this testimony Lew Rockwell puts up:
The OP wrote:German complaints about Jews were "understandable," said FDR.
Man. Can you see that one word that's quoted in that sentence written by a completely biased source?
OP wrote:The cause of anti-Semitism in Poland, FDR announced, was the economic success of Jewish businessmen there.
No quotes. No sources. No citations. This is some profound stuff!
And really, no example is better than those two. I haven't read the book, but come on...
I looked into the author who, himself, is frequently attacked by historians for being a partisan hack. An example all over the internet is a reader response to him:
Ficklstein wrote:Mr. Koch states that he is relying on Dr. Rafael Medoff of the David S, Wyman Institute for Holocaust studies for his almost total source of information. Yet it has been shown that the Wyman Institute's almost sole reason for existence is to discredit the Roosevelt Administration. For years it's only focus was to try and prove that FDR deliberately let Jewish concentration camp internees die when they could have been saved. The fact that Mr. Koch did not repeat this charge shows how little we can trust Dr. Medoff, since that accusation has been successfully challenged on numerous occasions.
If this transcript actually exits, I would like Midstream to print it in it's entirety (showing the actual quotation marks) so that its readers can see actually what President Roosevelt said.
The good doctor responds:
Ficklstein wrote:"The President stated that he felt the whole Jewish problem should be studied very carefully and that progress should definitely be planned. In other words, the number of Jews engaged ha the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc.) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population... The President stated that his plan would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc., in Germany, were Jews." (p.608) At a second meeting that day, Cape McCrea reported, FDR repeated his views "as to the Jewish situation."
You'll not he cut a portion out, which reads:
Casablanca correspondence wrote:Such a plan would therefore permit the Jews to engage in the professions, at the same time would not permit them to overcrowd the professions, and would present an unanswerable argument that they were being given their full rights. To the foregoing, General Nogues agreed generally, stating at the same time that it would be a sad thing for the French to win the war merely to open the way for the Jews to control the professions and the business world of North Africa.
Which is pretty important context, as the French wanted to keep North Africa and a bone to throw at the French colonial system (do remember this is a generation that grew up with the Drefus Affair) was hardly good to Jews anyway. So the Americans throw the French a bone and guarantee the rights of Jews. Yes, it's not perfect, but with the context still in—I think it's rather clear that it was supposed to offer protection, not restriction, for Jews.
Anyway, Haakon Out!
Alis Volat Propriis; Tiocfaidh ár lá; Proletarier Aller Länder, Vereinigt Euch!