“The Abandonment of the Jews” at 40: A Book That Saved Lives

by Rafael Medoff | November 26, 2024

This month marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of David S. Wyman’s The Abandonment of the Jews, a book that changed the way we think about our nation’s history—and also saved lives. That is a rare achievement.

Wyman (1929-2018), a Harvard-trained historian and grandson of two Protestant ministers, did not set out to write about the Holocaust. But he was puzzled by the reluctance of other scholars to confront the question of how America responded to the Nazi genocide, so he decided to explore it himself. The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945, was published by Pantheon in November 1984.

Prof. Wyman often spoke about how difficult it was for him, as a Christian, to find himself face to face with evidence of the meager response by American Christians, including our elected leaders, to news of the Holocaust. Sometimes he “cried for days” and had to take a break from his research. He said he “had been brought up with the belief that at the heart of Christianity is the precept that, when people need help, you should provide it.”  

Prior to the publication of The Abandonment of the Jews, the widespread assumption among the American public was that there was little or nothing the Roosevelt administration could have done to save Jews from the Holocaust. 

Prof. Wyman’s meticulous research demonstrated that there were many ways the U.S. could have aided European Jewish refugees, without interfering with the war effort or undermining America’s immigration laws. He documented how President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his State Department suppressed news about the Holocaust and ignored opportunities to rescue refugees. He exposed how U.S. planes struck within a few miles of the Auschwitz gas chambers—yet failed to bomb the railways and bridges leading to the camp, or the mass-murder machinery itself.

The Abandonment of the Jews quickly rose to the New York Times best-seller list, and reviewers were nearly unanimous in their acclaim. “We will not see a better book on this subject in our lifetime,” Prof. Leonard Dinnerstein concluded. Prof. Hasia Diner wrote that that Abandonment “systematically demolishes often repeated excuses for inaction.”

The Abandonment of the Jews won numerous prizes, went through seven hardcover printings and multiple paperback editions, and was translated into German, French, Hebrew, and Polish.

Most remarkably, the book also played a key role in the rescue of Jews from Ethiopia in 1985.

A secret agreement between Israel and Sudan in 1984 had enabled Israel to begin airlifting tens of thousands of Jews from an area along the Ethiopian-Sudanese border. But an overly eager American Jewish journalist rushed to publish the scoop, prompting Sudan to suddenly halt the airlifts in January 1985. That left some 800 Ethiopian Jewish refugees stranded at the border.

A team of Jewish activists, including Los Angeles Jewish publisher Phil Blazer and Nate Shapiro of the American Association for Ethiopian Jews, flew to Washington to seek U.S. intervention. In meetings with members of Congress and Vice President George H.W. Bush, they distributed copies of The Abandonment of the Jews and pleaded with them not to repeat the indifference of the Roosevelt years. 

    Senators Alan Cranston (D-California) and Rudy Boschwitz (R-Minnesota) and Congressmen Stephen Solarz (D-New York) and John Miller (R-Washington) spearheaded the bipartisan effort to press the Reagan-Bush administration for action.

Learning that Vice President Bush was scheduled to visit Sudan on diplomatic business shortly, Rep. Miller went to see him. Citing The Abandonment of the Jews, Miller told Bush “that this was a chance to write a very different history than the history of America’s response to the Holocaust.” Sudan might refuse to let the Israelis land on its soil, “but Sudan would not be able to say no to the United States–if our government insisted,” Miller argued.

On March 22, 1985, shortly after Bush’s meetings in Sudan, a fleet of U.S. Air Force C-130 Hercules transport planes airlifted the 800 refugees from Sudan to Israel. The vice president subsequently sent Prof. Wyman a handwritten note of thanks and made a point of saying in a speech afterwards, “Never again will the cries of abandoned Jews go unheard by the United States government.”

CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer, who at the time was the Washington correspondent for the Jerusalem Post, wrote: “Today’s direct and very active cooperation by the U.S. government in helping to rescue Ethiopian Jews is in marked contrast to the documented abandonment of European Jewish refugees before and during World War II…[which has been] well-documented in David S. Wyman’s recently published book, The Abandonment of the Jews.”

In 2008, Prof. Wyman visited an Israeli air force base, where he met Major-General Amir Eshel, who was involved in the 1985 airlift operation, and Moshe Gadaf and Ami Farradah, who, as eight year-olds, were among the Ethiopian Jewish children who were rescued. Wyman described meeting them as one of the most moving experiences of his life.

Forty years later, The Abandonment of the Jews remains the definitive study of America’s response to the Nazi genocide. A handful of polemicists and pundits have tried to excuse FDR’s Holocaust record, but additional research in the field in recent years has only reconfirmed Prof. Wyman’s original conclusion: President Roosevelt, “the era’s most prominent symbol of humanitarianism, turned away from one of history’s most compelling moral challenges.”

**As published in the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles – November 26, 2024

(Dr. Medoff is founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies and author of more than 20 books about Jewish history and the Holocaust. His latest is Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry, coauthored with Craig Yoe.)