ABSTRACT
American Jewry’s ineffectiveness in rescuing its European brethren was not for lack of concern, but lack of suffi cient political power. That insuffi ciency is diffi cult to recognize because the conspicuous Jewish presence in the Roosevelt administration made the opportunity for rescue seem propitious. In the earliest phase of the crisis, when a more generous policy of admission of refugees was urgently needed, opening the gates wider for the Jewish refugees was politically virtually impossible. During the Depression, the nation’s restrictive immigration policy gained new popular support to supplement the original nativist national origins formula on which the quota system of the Reed Johnson immigration law (1924) was based. How could refugees be admitted when “one third of the nation [was] ill-housed, ill-fed and ill-clothed?” argued restrictionists, using the president’s own ringing phrases.1
