ABSTRACT

During the refugee crisis of the 1930s the Roosevelt administration displayed its inability and apparent unwillingness to come to the support of endangered European Jews. As American Jews desperately searched for an answer to their European kin’s plight, they discovered that the small American Zionist movement seemed to have a practical answer to the need of European Jewry for a haven. The result was a steady growth in the membership rolls and treasuries of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) and Hadassah, the two largest Jewish nationalist organizations in the United States, and their smaller cousins, the socialist Poalei Zion and Orthodox religious Mizrachi.