Well Worth Saving: American Universities' Life-and-Death Decisions on Refugees from Nazi Europe

by Laurel Leff

Overview

A harrowing account of the profoundly consequential decisions American universities made about refugee scholars from Nazi-dominated Europe--a finalist for a 2020 National Jewish Book Award

The United States’ role in saving Europe’s intellectual elite from the Nazis is often told as a tale of triumph, which in many ways it was. America welcomed Albert Einstein and Enrico Fermi, Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse, Rudolf Carnap and Richard Courant, among hundreds of other physicists, philosophers, mathematicians, historians, chemists, and linguists who transformed the American academy. Yet for every scholar who survived and thrived, many, many more did not.

To be hired by an American university, a refugee scholar had to be world-class and well connected, not too old and not too young, not too right and not too left, and, most important, not too Jewish. Those who were unable to flee were left to face the horrors of the Holocaust. In this rigorously researched book, Laurel Leff rescues from obscurity scholars who were deemed “not worth saving” and tells the riveting, full story of the hiring decisions universities made during the Nazi era.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300249057
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	06/24/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	848,509
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Laurel Leff is associate director of the Jewish Studies Program and associate professor of journalism at Northeastern University. She is the author of Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America's Most Important Newspaper.Suzanne Toren is an actor who has appeared on and off Broadway, in regional theaters, and occasionally on TV. Over a period of several decades, she has narrated close to 1000 audiobooks for most major publishers. She has received multiple Audie nominations and many industry awards, including Narrator of the Year.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction 1

1 The Nazi University 10

2 Rescue Efforts 29

3 Unsympathetic Administrators 52

4 World Class and Well Connected 66

5 Age, Politics, Gender, and Money 84

6 Too Jewish or Foreign 105

7 State Department Barriers 120

8 An International Crisis 137

9 More Need, Less Help 165

10 A Last Chance in France 191

11 Security Fears 210

12 Final Appeals 227

Epilogue 249

Appendix 1 U.S. Organizations and Personnel 261

Appendix 2 Displaced Scholars and How They Fared 265

Notes 279

Acknowledgments 331

Index 333

Editorial Reviews

10/28/2019

Northeastern University journalism professor Leff (Buried by the Times) unsettles the prevailing narrative of American higher education as a refuge for European scholars fleeing the Holocaust in this harrowing, deeply researched account. Leff explains that, though professors with university job offers weren’t subject to immigration quotas, fewer than 1,000 individuals received special “non-quota” visas from 1933 to 1941. Successful applicants had to be world-class, well-connected scholars, Leff writes, who weren’t “too old or too young, too right or too left, or, most important, too Jewish. Having money helped; being a woman did not.” Leff details the fates of eight academics, including Polish-German musicologist Mieczyslaw Kolinski, who was forced to go into hiding in Belgium despite having an offer to teach at Northwestern University, and Austrian zoologist Leonore Brecher, who was deported from Vienna to the Maly Trostinec extermination camp in Belarus and was never heard from again. While some Americans worked to save colleagues and friends through individual channels or in coordination with such groups as the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced Foreign Scholars, others made a bad situation worse: anti-Semitic university officials and an obstructionist U.S. state department, Leff convincingly argues, required paperwork that was impossible to complete in a war zone. The book’s loose narrative structure sometimes makes it difficult to keep names and details straight, but scholars of the Holocaust, immigration policy, and higher education will find Leff’s exhaustive account enlightening. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"Laurel Leff’s focused, well-researched book sheds new light. . . Leff’s book is an act of troubling remembrance."—Michael Roth, Washington Post

"A sober and fair—but devastating—volume."—Martn Peretz, Wall Street Journal

“Laurel Leff has turned out another powerful, meticulously researched, and groundbreaking work. As engaging as it is disheartening, Well Worth Saving significantly broadens our understanding of the inadequate response of important segments of American society to the Nazi persecution of European Jewry.”—Rafael Medoff, Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs

"Leff unsettles the prevailing narrative of American higher education as a refuge for European scholars fleeing the Holocaust in this harrowing, deeply researched account. . . . Scholars of the Holocaust, immigration policy, and higher education will find Leff’s exhaustive account enlightening."—Publishers Weekly

"Closely researched and absorbing. . . . I salute Leff for addressing this unwritten history with such a devastating book."—Helen Epstein, Arts Fuse

"Particularly timely when immigration, refugees and anti-Semitism are much in the headlines."—Sandee Brawarsky, Jewish Week/Times of Israel

“Entertaining and accessible, Heard’s discussion will appeal to both scientific and general audiences.” —Publishers Weekly

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award, American Jewish Studies category, sponsored by The Jewish Book Council

“This powerfully written, heartbreaking history exposes the terrible price that nativism, antisemitism, narrow-mindedness, and bureaucratic inertia exacted on some of Europe's most learned women and men."—Jonathan D. Sarna, author of American Judaism: A History

“Leff asks us to grapple with a history that is more complicated and less triumphant than the version many of us think we know. The stories she tells of refugee scholars, their allies, and the obstacles they faced within American colleges and universities are important for us to understand.”—Peter Salovey, President of Yale University

“Scrupulously researched, beautifully crafted, and passionately felt, Laurel Leff’s book provides a balanced and sobering account of how the United States, and especially the American academic community, failed to respond aggressively to the plight of European Jewish scholars between 1933 and 1942.”—Richard M. Freeland, author of Academia’s Golden Age

“In this meticulously researched book, Laurel Leff recounts the dismal history of the many brilliant researchers who, unlike the Albert Einsteins and Hannah Arendts, were not rescued from the Nazis. Leff gives names, faces and biographies to these forgotten victims of the Nazi madness. Her beautifully written book is an act of belated rescue.”—David Biale, author of Gershom Scholem

“Well Worth Saving is a disturbing book. While there were some heroes in the American academic scene during the 1930s and 1940s, there were many professors and university administrators who, despite knowing the consequences, turned their backs on European scholars who were desperately trying to escape from Europe. This book will leave many American academics shaking their heads in shame at the legacy of their institutions.”—Deborah E. Lipstadt, author of Antisemitism Here and Now
 

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