During the 1930s and ‘40s, some Americans overcame enormous challenges to help Jewish refugees who were seeking to escape from Nazism’s grip. Most worked within networks of religious or humanitarian organizations, using both legal and illegal means to overcome significant obstacles, including restrictive US immigration laws. This lecture will focus on Americans who took extraordinary risks, and sometimes jeopardized even their own safety, to assist people in areas of Europe that Nazi Germany controlled or occupied.

Daniel Greene is Subject Matter Expert at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Adjunct Professor of History at Northwestern University. He curated Americans and the Holocaust, an exhibition that opened in 2018 at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, to commemorate its twenty-fifth anniversary. The exhibition also inspired The U.S. and the Holocaust, an Emmy-winning documentary film directed by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein that aired on PBS in 2022. Greene’s co-edited (with Edward Phillips) book, Americans and the Holocaust: A Reader, was published by Rutgers University Press in 2022. His first book The Jewish Origins of Cultural Pluralism: The Menorah Association and American Diversity (Indiana University Press, 2011) won the American Jewish Historical Society’s Saul Viener Prize in 2012.

This program is presented in partnership with The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. Generous support has been provided by the donors to the Jean G. Zeldin Partners in Holocaust Education Fund at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education.