A new exhibit opens Monday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to mark its 25th anniversary, focusing on Americans’ response to Nazism and Jewish refugees.
“Americans and the Holocaust” features a wall covered by the raft of documents Jews needed to obtain to the United States, examples of how anti-Semitic politicians sabotaged State Department efforts to admit immigrants and never-before-publicized polls from the 1930s and ’40s.
“There’s deep anti-Semitism in the United States in the 1930s,” the exhibit’s curator, Daniel Greene, told The Washington Times during a press preview last week.
Visitors can walk through a winding corridor that displays an interactive touchscreen map of newspaper articles about events from the 1930s, all of which the museum crowdsourced.
“We asked students and citizen historians from around the country to go into their local papers and find articles about their local papers [covering] Nazism,” Mr. Greene said. “They’ve uploaded 15,000 articles to that website since 2016.”
The exploration through the 1930s will take visitors on a virtual voyage across the sea via a mural showing of how few refugees were admitted to the U.S. before the war.
“The tragedy is that it’s really before the Holocaust begins that America could have done the most to make a difference,” Mr. Greene said. “If we had maximized the quotas at this point, and issued all the immigration visas that we could, we could let in 120,000 refugees over this 1933 to 1941 period.”
Visitors also can absorb compilations of newsreels, radio newscasts and movies showcasing the country’s growing concerns about communism and Jews fleeing Eastern Europe.
“Anti-Semites in America at the time are strongly linking Jews with communism and saying they can’t be loyal to America,” Mr. Greene said.
Polling questions on colorful boards are scattered throughout the space, highlighting the economic anxieties Americans faced in the Great Depression and their reluctance to enter in another world war so soon after the last one.
Some questions echo similar concerns today, such as a 1939 poll on whether to admit and house 10,000 German refugee children — 66 percent of Americans said “no.”
At the end of the exhibit is a portion of the chain-link fence used to pen 982 Jewish refugees into a makeshift camp in New York, where they waited for more than a year to be formally recognized as immigrants. Through the links visitors can see a photograph of the crowds who had gathered for VE-Day in 1945.
The exhibit offers an important history lesson, made timely in a recent poll by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany that found that 41 percent of Americans surveyed did not know what that Auschwitz was a Nazi concentration camp and 22 percent had not heard of the Holocaust.
“For some college students, the 1930s might seem like ancient history and we need to present it in a way that is urgent and relevant,” said Mr. Greene.
“Americans and the Holocaust” will be open for visitors in the museum until 2021. Ticket to the Holocaust Museum are free but may require pre-ordering.
• Julia Airey can be reached at jairey@washingtontimes.com.
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