The New York Times and newspapers throughout the nation in 1938 expressed horror at the hatred directed against Jews in Germany during the vicious Nazi pogrom known as Kristallnacht: Night of the Broken Glass. The sympathetic reporting in the press and over the radio was reassuring to American Jews who worried about family members overseas.
But when Jews in Germany and Europe begged for asylum in the United States, President Franklin Roosevelt refused. The Democratic president, who received over 80% of the Jewish vote in each of his four presidential elections, claimed that Germans had "understandable complaints" against Jews. Too many Jews became lawyers, doctors, and teachers and "overcrowded the professions," said Roosevelt. And that gave Jews an "undue influence" well beyond the small percentage they represented in a country's population. If Jews comprised only 1% of a country, then no more than 1% of teachers in that country should be Jews.
"The best way to settle the Jewish question," asserted the closet anti-Semite in the Oval Office (and recorded in Vice President Henry Wallace's diary), was to "spread the Jews thin all over the world."
With such a sentiment, Roosevelt was naturally in accord with the British mandate that restricted Jewish refugees from settling in what was then called Palestine (the Roman name for the region they conquered from the indigenous Jews, ed.).
The Muslims' hatred of Jews was fired up continuously by their imams, and they allied with Nazi Germany against the British and America. To keep an unrestricted path to absolutely essential resources, Roosevelt formed a policy of appeasement of oil-rich Middle East nations that continues to this day.
But eight decades of bribes and boot licking have had scant effect. Muslims still hate Jews. But now they have the strangest partners. Adolf Hitler's National Socialists have been supplanted by an array of neurotic socialists, empty-headed college students, far-left zealots, militant radicals, masked Antifa, and even the Queer community.
This unruly congregation sets the agenda for the same Democratic Party that allowed Franklin Roosevelt to leave Jews at the mercy of devils in 1938 and now blindly facilitates Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah in their goal of annihilating the main sanctuary of Jews: the nation-state of Israel.
Since signing on with Roosevelt, America's Jews have acted like battered wives, crawling back to their abuser after every beating. In these past three years alone, they have silently acquiesced to the Democrats' many misuses of their tax money; to inflation; increases in crime; the encroachments on women's rights; and even the grooming of their children by men dressed as women.
They nodded dumbly in agreement when the corrupt mainstream media insisted nothing was wrong with the Party program.
It may be, however, that America's Jews have been shocked from their slumber by the astounding surge throughout the world of Jew-hating Muslims and their ignorant supporters calling for an end to Israel, and assaulting anyone who objects.
The college students and others waving Palestinian Arab flags were programmed by far-left teachers and the leftist media and the cadre of anti-Semites in the Democratic Party to believe the canard that when "the oppressed Palestinian Arabs" tortured, raped, and burned alive Jewish women and children on October 7, 2023, they were merely expressing "a righteous resistance" to "Israel's evil apartheid system".
That was the first stage of the New Kristallnacht. And we clearly recognize the New Nazis. The second stage may well take place in the land of the Great Satan. If so, heaven knows what role eight million foreigners who violated our borders will play in the chaos.
The 2024 elections will show if Jewish voters were able to see through the shell game that President Biden is now playing over America's southern border. After inviting and even paying millions of migrants to enter our nation illegally, with a possible abundance of Muslim terrorists among them, Biden passionately declares how he intends to secure the border.
Franklin Roosevelt did the same thing. He ignored the plight of Jews in Europe until most of them had been slaughtered. Then in 1944, planning for his fourth presidential election, Roosevelt established the War Refugee Board "to aid civilian victims of the Axis powers." Roosevelt stressed how urgent it was for action to be taken at once, "to forestall the Nazis' plan to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe."
He did not say how he might have saved a million Jews three years earlier if he had taken such urgent action then.
Five months later, no doubt laughing at Roosevelt's empty pronouncements, the Nazis sent the remaining 400,000 Hungarian Jews to their deaths in Auschwitz.
John Pehle, director of the War Refugee Board, admitted bleakly that they had done "too little, too late."
Is this great stain on the Democratic Party's legacy about to be repeated—once again doing too little, too late, to save the Jews?
And will the Jews do more to save themselves by moving away from a political party with its Roosevelts and Bidens that have taken their votes for granted while reaching out to their sworn enemies?
Robert Scott Kellner, a US navy veteran, is a retired English professor who taught at the University of Massachusetts and Texas A & M University.
He is the grandson of the German justice inspector and diarist Friedrich Kellner, and is the editor and translator of My Opposition: The Diary of Friedrich Kellner--A German against the Third Reich, Cambridge University Press, United Kingdom.