A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust

Description

In his landmark bestseller, The Abandonment of the Jews, David Wyman exhaustively detailed America's failure to help rescue the victims of Nazi genocide. But one man, Peter Bergson, led a tireless battle against that tide of indifference, making it impossible for American leaders to plead ignorance of the German atrocities. Now, Wyman, along with Rafael Medoff, tells for the first time the story of the man who led America's most effective campaign to rescue victims of the Holocaust. A Race Against Death utilizes extensive firsthand interviews to present Peter Bergson's own account of his remarkable life and struggles. Facing deportation from America and threats on his life, Bergson employed every conceivable method to influence policy and public opinion: he personally hounded Congressmen to support a rescue; placed controversial full-page ads in major newspapers demanding action; and drew a record crowd of 40,000 to a rally and memorial pageant at Madison Square Garden. Award-winning historian David Wyman is the definitive authority on America's action-and inaction-during the Holocaust. In A Race Against Death, he and Rafael Medoff return to this tragic era in American history and chronicle one of its few heroes.

David S. Wyman is the chairman of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and the Josiah DuBois Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941-1945 (The New Press) and Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941; the co-author, with Rafael Medoff, of A Race Against Death: Peter Bergson, America, and the Holocaust (The New Press); and the editor of the thirteen-volume America and the Holocaust and The World Reacts to the Holocaust. He holds honorary doctorates from Hebrew Union College and Yeshiva University. Rafael Medoff is a visiting scholar in the Jewish Studies program at the State University of New York at Purchase and author of The Deafening Silence: American Jewish Leaders and the Holocaust.

This dramatic, important book caps David Wyman's splendid career as the foremost historian of U.S. inaction and obstruction of rescue in the face of Nazi slaughter. All students, scholars, and activists committed to averting another century of war and terror will benefit from Wyman's remarkable and steadfast research.