Sociology of Religion: Worksheet--"The American Experience: America and the Holocaust"

1. When and how did the first authenticated information about the Nazi killing of 2 million Jews and their plans to murder the rest first reach the American people and their leaders? What was the role of Rabbi Nathan Wise?

2. Read about anti-Semitism in Wikipedia. What seem to be its major sources historically?

3. How did American immigration laws make it more difficult to take steps to save the Jews of Europe?

4. What were some of the ways in which American anti-Semitism was expressed during the years of the Depression and World War II?

5. How did the American State Department come to be a major obstacle to the immigration and rescue of European Jews? How did the Treasury Department come to be one of the major proponents of immigration and rescue?

6. What was Executive Order 9417, why was it signed by Roosevelt, and what were its results?

Sociology of Religion: Groups--"America and the Holocaust"

1. Why do you think the American immigration law of 1924 set such tight restrictions on immigration from eastern and Southern Europe (tying quotas to the number of each nationality in the U.S. in 1890, before most of the immigration from southern and eastern Europe)?

2. Why do you suppose there was so little response to the November 1942 articles in the New York Times and other major American newspapers confirming the Nazi plan to exterminate all the Jews of Europe?

3. How can we understand the American attitudes that would lead to the turning away of a shipload of Jewish children trying to flee from Nazi persecution (and the quick acceptance of of a shipload of English children that were refugees from the war)?

4. Max Weber argued that loyalties grow more readily around what he called status groups (race, ethnic, and religious groups) than around social class differences. Certainly the fact that mostly Christian Americans would in the early 1940s identify Jews as the third greatest threat to America (after Japanese and Germans) seems to support this argument. How do you suppose that Jews came to be demonized that way, even in the United States?

Note: If you are interested, the UMD library has a video, "One Survivor Remembers" (VC 2816) which tells the story of Gerda Weissman Klein, the Jewish survivor of Nazi forced labor camps, who eventually marries Kurt Klein.